France: strong and stable leadership

"We now have strong and stable leadership but in France, not Britain," says Gideon Rachman in the Financial Times. Theresa May enters Brexit talks "gravely weakened" after the general election. Emmanuel Macron, by contrast, is on course for the huge parliamentary majority that May "once dreamt of". Macron's one-year-old La Rpublique en Marche (REM) party and its ally, the small centrist MoDem party, took 32.3% of the vote in the first round of elections on 11 June and are expected to end up with 400-450 of the 577 seats in the National Assembly in second-round elections on 18 June. With a "win on that scale", continues Rachman, Macron would form the "second largest parliamentary majority in the history of the Fifth Republic".

That would allow him to enact his pro-business reforms swiftly, "including a bill to make the jobs market more flexible, and measures to boost police powers to fight home-grown terrorism", says Anne-Sylvaine Chassany, also in the Financial Times. The result was, however, "marred" by record-low turnout of just 40%, notes Angelique Chrisafis in The Guardian. Macron's supporters will now be doing everything they can to get voters to the polls on 18 June to avoid accusations that his "mandate was weakened by abstention".

As Theresa May headed to Paris on Tuesday for a meeting with Macron, you could "almost smell the schadenfreude", says Jeremy Warner in The Daily Telegraph. The symbolism could "scarcely have been greater". At the time of the UK referendum campaign, the continent was "wracked by financial and political crisis" and populism was "rampant". Why would Britain, a "haven of stability" with "record levels of job creation" want to be shackled to Europe's "ruinous construct"?

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But a year on, "the tables have turned", says Warner. Almost all economic indicators are "turning negative" in the UK, but in Europe, where the "populist tide is ebbing fast" (The Front Nationale won just 13% of votes in the recent election, potentially leaving the party with only a handful of seats), the economy is "growing strongly".Macron, a passionate Europhile, said on Tuesday that the door is still open for Britain to stay in the EU, but that it will become "more and more difficult to go backwards" as Brexit negotiations progress.

And he won't be making those negotiations easy, according to Peter Foster in The Daily Telegraph. He has described Brexit as a "crime" against the European project. He "has every intention of extracting a Brexit bounty', whether clawing back euro clearing from the City or passing a Buy EU' act to boost EU firms".

With Britain outside the EU, France can also "hoover up jobs in finance and manufacturing", says Rachman. And Macron's "vision of a revitalised France, inside a revitalised EU, actually works better if Brexit proceeds uninterrupted". Britain has long "acted as a brake on European federalism" and without it there is a "stronger chance of restarting the Franco-German motor that traditionally drove European integration". A "hard" Brexit might suit him.

I don't think so, says Foster. The "mood music" may be "menacing", but we still share "massive" common interests "on defence, citizens on both sides of the Channel, on borders and tourism links" and intelligence cooperation. More importantly, adds Warner, a "no-deal Brexit" could upset Europe's economic recovery, "killing off" Macron's planned reform agenda. "A bad deal is therefore as unattractive for him as it is for Britain. Europe desperately needs its economic sweet spot to continue."