Why Macron’s Taiwan shrug has irked the rest of Europe

Good morning. French president Emmanuel Macron went to China vowing to take Europe’s message on Ukraine to Xi Jinping. He has returned to Europe with another message altogether, on Taiwan. I explain why that has irritated other capitals. And in an interview in The Hague, the Dutch finance minister leans into a German proposal for stricter EU rules on debt.

Oh, Manu again

Emmanuel Macron says he wants to make Europe the “third superpower”. But his explanations on how to get there aren’t exactly popular.

Context: Macron has sparked anger across European capitals and in Washington for saying Europe should, in the name of “strategic autonomy”, distance itself from US-China tensions over Taiwan and avoid the “great risk” of getting “caught up in crises that are not ours”.

The timing of the comments was unfortunate. Shortly after they were published, China began large-scale military drills near Taiwan.

His words also jarred with those of European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen, who visited China with him and made a point of referring to the EU’s policy that there should be no change to Taiwan’s status in her discussion with Xi.

Taking Taiwan’s side in a potential defence against China, as the US has vowed to do, is not an abstract debate. China’s conquest would promote global autocracy, reshape the geopolitics of the Indo-Pacific (where France proudly claims to be a power) and give Beijing control over the world’s most advanced semiconductors.

Few EU leaders would disagree with Macron’s broad point that it is fiendishly difficult to agree a coherent, united stance towards China given the economic and geopolitical realities.

But they take umbrage at the French president musing publicly on this theme — or worse still in private chats with Xi — rather than with his 26 EU allies. “The EU is bigger than France, and Macron is not setting the line of the Union,” said one senior diplomat.

Andrew Michta, senior fellow at the Atlantic Council, suggested that one upside could be in “forcing others in Europe to take a position on what [Macron] implied was a ‘European view’”.

Macron’s detractors point out that a united Europe is a far more powerful foe than a bickering one, as Russian president Vladimir Putin found out to his dismay last year. No surprise that Chinese state propagandists seized on his comments. (As did Russia’s foreign ministry)

This isn’t Macron’s first foreign policy controversy that has sparked ire from fellow European leaders. In 2019 he said Nato was “experiencing brain death”. Last June he warned against “humiliating” Russia, and in December he said Moscow needed security guarantees after the war in Ukraine.

His defenders moan that critics misread his words, or fail to understand his message. Those critics answer back that, given it keeps happening, maybe some fault lies with the messenger?

Chart du jour: To let

The shift to hybrid and remote working prompted by the Covid-19 pandemic has got commercial property owners fretting about the falling value of office buildings. But pricing changes have reflected more slowly on the European market than elsewhere.

Je m’en fisc

The Netherlands has joined their frugal German neighbours in calls for tough debt-reduction targets as the EU overhauls its public finance rules, writes Sam Fleming.

Context: The debate over the Stability and Growth Pact is resuming, after the rules governing EU member state finances were suspended during the pandemic. Berlin has set out a tough line, proposing that high-debt countries reduce their debt-to-GDP ratios by 1 percentage point each year.

Sigrid Kaag, the Dutch finance minister and deputy prime minister, told the FT that “common safeguards” would be needed to ensure there was sufficient debt reduction by all member states.

The Netherlands wanted to see a “common numerical benchmark” in the revised rules to ensure better transparency and comparability between member states, she said. This would avoid each country’s situation becoming “so idiosyncratic that you lose the political oversight over the tableau”.

Unlike Berlin, the Netherlands has yet to quantify what debt-reduction targets it wants to see.

But, like Berlin, its ideas hint at constraints on the leeway for Brussels to strike bespoke debt-reduction deals with each member state, which is foreseen under the latest European Commission reform proposal.

Kaag said the Netherlands wanted an analysis of each country’s debt sustainability to be a building block of their respective payback plans. This would build “national ownership” and accountability.

“We think it is very important that there is variance, that there is space for reform and investments, but of course debt reduction needs to be tangible and needs to be measurable,” she said. “We want sufficient debt reduction.”

What to watch today

1. US president Joe Biden arrives in Belfast for a three-day state visit to Northern Ireland and the Republic.

2. Macron travels to the Netherlands to meet Dutch King Willem-Alexander.

3. Polish prime minister Mateusz Morawiecki begins a three-day visit to the US.

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