On January 20, the first anniversary of Donald Trump’s second inauguration, French President Emmanuel Macron took the podium at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, and delivered the kind of speech he’s given for nearly a decade. European nations, he argued, must strengthen their economic and military competitiveness to meet the challenges of the world’s predatory and unreliable superpowers: the United States and China.
The message wasn’t new, but the context very much was. Over the previous year, President Trump had hit Europe with huge tariffs, sided with Russia against Ukraine, raised questions about the U.S. commitment to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, and threatened to steal Greenland, an autonomous territory of Denmark, which happens to be a longstanding American ally and founding member of NATO. An audience of world leaders that had once yawned at the French president’s calls for “strategic autonomy” was listening now.
It helped that Macron was wearing blue-tinted aviator sunglasses at the indoor event. The reason for the shades: a broken blood vessel in the eye. But they gave him machismo. “[T]he French president’s aviators have placed him at the top of the pecking order,” The Telegraph swooned in a piece headlined “Can Macron’s sunglasses save the West?”
The French and much of the world took note of Macron’s speech, seizing on one line in particular: “having a place like Europe, which sometimes is too slow, for sure, and needs to be reformed, for sure, but which is predictable, loyal, and where you know that the rule of the game is just the rule of law…”
It was perfect: heavily French-accented English, emphasis on—and pauses around—both utterances of the colloquial “for sure.” In that mysterious way that moments become memes, Macron’s “for sure” was branded on t-shirts, spoofed across social media, and even remixed by French DJs. Months later, the words still hang in the Parisian air: yelped by youths sitting Seine-side, or repeated in Macron-speak after anyone lets a “for sure” slip in casual conversation.
The phrase has lived longer than most viral soundbites, and I’d bet that some of its staying power rests on Macron’s surrounding speech. As Trump bullies the world, voters outside the United States crave leaders who stand up to the ugly American. And since the Trump era began in 2017, Macron has contended that Europe must be able to defend itself without U.S. support. Back then, he was a lonelier preacher: then-German Chancellor Angela Merkel was not on board; other European Union (EU) leaders were wary of distancing themselves from the U.S. and its security guarantees, and still others interpreted the French president’s creed as a ploy to increase Paris’s power.
Two Macron terms later, Western leaders have come around to the 48-year-old’s perspective. In another widely shared Davos speech, Prime Minister Mark Carney declared that Canada is done being the world’s softie. “We are no longer just relying on the strength of our values, but also the value of our strength,” Carney said, pledging to double defense spending by decade’s end.
This shift toward rearmament and independence from the United States has only accelerated since Trump launched his war in Iran in February. Last month, The Wall Street Journal reported that NATO officials in Brussels have begun laying informal plans for Europe to defend itself through the alliance’s existing military structure, reshaped with the continent’s own strength at the fore, were America to withdraw from the 77-year-old alliance.
As Trump bullies the world, voters outside the United States crave leaders who stand up to the ugly American. And since the Trump era began, Macron has contended that Europe must be able to defend itself without American support.
So now, less than a year out from France’s presidential election, when Macron’s geopolitical instincts have proven both prophetic and viral, should be his moment, right? Pas du tout. Not at all.
Though Macron’s favorability ratings spiked 6 points after Davos, it was from an appallingly low base: tied with, or just above, former President François Hollande’s record-low 11 percent. That’s around a third of Trump’s dismal numbers.
After a decade of austerity measures, tax cuts, swelling debt, and rising costs, working- and middle-class French citizens are hurting, and they don’t feel Macron is easing their pain. So while a majority of French citizens worry about war in Europe (75 percent), consider it likely that Russia will invade additional European countries if it prevails in Ukraine (60 percent), and believe that France must invest in strategic autonomy (62 percent), according to a December 2025 survey conducted by the nonprofit More in Common, the public’s agreement with their leader stops there. An April poll from the consulting firm Ipsos found that raising defense spending was less important to voters than preserving health care, improving education, lowering living costs, and 15 other “priority issues.” For sure, the French liked Macron’s tough talk and shades, but they’re not for more military spending at the expense of the safety net.
European nations’ best hope for security without the United States is to bolster their militaries individually and forge a credible deterrent bloc collectively. To make that happen, leaders must build national consensus on defense spending; and despite his innumerable speeches on the subject, Macron has failed to convince his own voters. Among the most prominent of the 30 potential candidates clamoring to succeed him, some are skeptical not only of remilitarization but also of the EU and NATO.
If France is a bellwether—and every indication is that it is—a “European NATO” is neither around the corner nor on the horizon, meaning that a U.S. withdrawal from the transatlantic alliance would be an especially special present for one murderous Russian authoritarian.
Macron’s perspective on strategic autonomy may have been rarer in Europe a decade ago, but it wasn’t new to France. That the Americans, with their nuclear umbrella and military might, are unreliable security partners was a core belief of Charles de Gaulle, the French resistance hero and president from 1959 to 1969. President de Gaulle—hearing Henry Kissinger’s early Cold War-era words on NATO, that “no U.S. president would ever risk the safety of the housewife in Kansas to protect the housewife in Hamburg”—pulled France out of NATO’s integrated military command structure in 1966 to develop a French nuclear program. France rejoined in 2009, and Europe is sure glad it has its own force de frappe now.
In February 2025, the Brussels-based think tank Bruegel released an assessment of what Europe would need to defend itself against Russia, assuming an alliance without America. Given the 2024 NATO planning assumption that the 100,000 U.S. troops in Europe would be tripled if Russia attacked, Bruegel estimates that Europe will need 300,000 additional troops—and likely, north of that, because the cohesion and “combat power” of U.S. troops is greater than those from 29 separate European armies. Bruegel estimates that more tanks and artillery are needed than currently exist in the French, German, Italian, and British land forces combined. And then there are the less quantifiable areas where Europe lags America: reconnaissance, weapons production, space tech, and, of course, the all-important continent-wide nuclear umbrella.
The EU and its members are addressing these shortcomings. In early March, Macron offered France’s nuclear umbrella to European allies. While Germany and the United Kingdom are jointly developing stealth cruise and hypersonic missiles, Berlin is on track to spend €650 billion on the military in the next five years—more than doubling spending over the previous five. Plus, “19 EU member states have received more than €90 billion in low-interest Security Action for Europe (SAFE) loans designed to finance collaborative, cross-border defense production,” as Washington Monthly Contributing Writer Tamar Jacoby reports.
If France is a bellwether, a “European NATO” is neither around the corner nor on the horizon, meaning that a U.S. withdrawal from the transatlantic alliance would be an especially special present for one murderous Russian authoritarian.
But more is needed. The bottom line, according to Bruegel, is that Europe must hike defense spending from 2 percent of GDP to 3.5 percent to maintain the deterrence it enjoys under a U.S.-led NATO. Despite having the third-largest army in NATO and ranking second-most-powerful in the alliance in terms of military might, France spends just above 2 percent of its GDP on defense.
In January, Macron announced an additional €36 billion in military spending by 2030, bringing defense appropriations to nearly €450 billion for 2024–2030, roughly 2.5 percent of GDP. In April, his plan went to parliament with a July 14 deadline. However, as Le Monde bluntly put it, “France currently lacks the means” to enact it—much less achieve the 5 percent of GDP target that France and other NATO allies collectively agreed they’d hit by 2035—“unless it engages in serious debate over its economic, fiscal, and budgetary policies.” If that debate includes spending cuts, higher taxes on a citizenry already paying the second-highest rates in Europe, or still more debt for a country currently holding the EU’s third-largest government-debt-to-GDP ratio, the proposal will face significant political resistance; in May 2025, only 45 percent of the French, surveyed by the European Council on Foreign Relations, supported increasing military spending.
In France, where wages have stagnated, income inequality has spiked; the National Assembly is more divided than ever; and populist movements are rising from both the far-left and far-right. Sound familiar?
When I moved to Paris in 2023, I was surprised by the widespread contempt for Macron. I saw him as many New York Times readers still do: a level-headed, diplomatic statesman. When he took office at 39 in 2017, becoming France’s youngest head of state since Napoleon, his good looks, easy charm, and congenital devotion to multilateral cooperation drew flattering comparisons to Barack Obama. But Macron didn’t win because he was uniquely charismatic. He won because he wasn’t Marine Le Pen, then the leader of the far-right Rassemblement National (RN), daughter of notorious antisemite Jean-Marie Le Pen, and France’s premier “great replacement” theorist.
In the first round of the 2017 presidential election, Macron scooped up 24 percent of the vote, beating Le Pen by less than 3 percent. Others also grabbed significant shares. To Macron’s left, Jean-Luc Mélenchon came in with 19.6 percent, and to his right, François Fillon received 20 percent. When Macron beat Le Pen in the second round, the French were less smitten with the centrist than relieved not to have a leader famed for comparing Muslims to Nazis.
That gratitude faded fast. With his first budget, Macron passed a slew of policies aimed at making France friendlier to international capital—including narrowing the scope of its 30-year-old wealth tax. In so doing, the president, an investment banker before entering politics, earned a nickname that was not conducive to popularity in the land of égalité: le président des riches (president of the rich). Protesters have responded to Macron’s economic policies by lighting cars, buildings, and bike share stations on fire several times since.
The Yellow Vest protests between 2018 and 2020, for one, began in response to Macron’s fuel taxes, which hit lower-income rural residents harder than e-biking Parisians. Activists set banks, luxury retailers, and fancy brasseries ablaze; Macron’s government responded with aggressive—some allege excessive—policing. And in 2023, millions protested Macron’s pension reform, which raised the retirement age from 62 to 64. His insistence that the age hike was necessary might have gone down easier had he not enacted tax reforms that benefit the wealthiest 1 percent.
With his first budget, Macron passed a slew of policies aimed at making France friendlier to international capital—earning a nickname that was not conducive to popularity in the land of égalité: le président des riches (president of the rich).
Macron also cut housing benefits, slashed higher education, and proposed eliminating two jours fériés (national holidays). Due to the unpopularity of his reforms, the president’s prime ministers have resorted to using Article 49.3—a “constitutional weapon” to pass laws without a parliamentary vote—more than most administrations since France’s Fifth Republic was established in 1958. Not coincidentally, France has had five prime ministers since 2024.
Famously, the French “work to live” while Americans “live to work”: We Western workaholics employ this refrain to romanticize the French attitude toward labor. Not only is it true—I frequently see working-age Parisians enjoying a vin rouge on a café terrasse at 10 a.m. on a Wednesday—it’s central to France’s self-image.
Unlike in America, where welfare is often equated with undeserved handouts, the French define themselves by the strength of their social safety net. When I asked François-Xavier Demoures, author of a 2020 More in Common report that explored France’s social divisions, if he’s proud to be French, he slapped his carte Vitale (national health insurance card) on the table. “French pride is tied to whether or not citizens feel delivered for,” Demoures replied. “This is a pillar of our common identity.”
In their 2017 book, L’illusion du bloc bourgeois (the illusion of the bourgeoisie bloc), two economists, Bruno Amable and Stefano Palombarini, estimate that only a quarter of the French support Macron-style neoliberalism. His policies, they posit, supercharged the alienation of the working and lower-middle class.
Over the last decade, Le Pen has weaponized public anger at Macron, arguing that the cosmopolitan president and the EU bureaucrats she says he champions are to blame for France’s pain. When Macron slashed the wealth tax, she accused him of rewarding his donors. Amid the retirement-age fight, Le Pen proposed allowing those who began work before age 20 an early exit at 60—a blue-collar focused plan for those who didn’t squander their youth at université.
While Le Pen’s RN party nominally supports higher military spending (without a plan to finance it), its legislators believe policy must be made in Paris, not Brussels, and that the defense manufacturers who benefit should be French—threatening joint procurement and cross-border industrial production efforts. Since Macron’s risky decision to hold snap elections in 2024, the RN has held the most seats in the National Assembly.
Le Pen herself can’t enter next year’s presidential election: Her March 2025 conviction for embezzling EU funds came with a five-year ban on running for office. (She appealed the ban, and a July verdict is expected.) But whoever the RN puts forward—likely current RN President Jordan Bardella, who shares most of Le Pen’s views and carries less political baggage (not to mention he’s currently dating a literal princess)—will be a frontrunner in 2027.
Meanwhile, on the populist left, Mélenchon, the leader of the La France Insoumise party, which, with its allies, represents the Assembly’s largest coalition, has proposed breaking with the EU in its current form. In May, Mélenchon announced that he will seek the presidency again in 2027, and vowed, if elected, to leave NATO—which said “serves only one thing”: “placing [France] under the supervision of the United States.” He opposes spending on what he’s termed a “war economy,” and instead favors programs aimed at reducing inequality.
Pro-Russian views are most common among RN members, and second-most common among those of La France Insoumise, according to More in Common. Both parties’ voters were the least likely to agree that “it is very important for France that Ukraine defend its sovereignty,” and the most likely to believe that France has more urgent economic needs than bolstering defense (RN voters: 45 percent; La France Insoumise: a whopping 61 percent). More in Common and Le Figaro surveys also showed that voters, regardless of party, consider homeland security—like “crime and delinquency” or “Islamist terrorism”—more worrisome than Moscow.
Unlike in America, where welfare is often equated with undeserved handouts, the French define themselves by the strength of their social safety net. “French pride is tied to whether or not citizens feel delivered for,” said François-Xavier Demoures. “This is a pillar of our common identity.”
As Le Pen and Mélenchon paint Macron as a globalist elite, a common sentiment I hear from Parisians is that their president jaunts on the world stage to avoid the hard work of improving life for non-wealthy constituents—claims similar to those levied against our president after his dictator-napping in Venezuela and war in Iran. Even a member of the French air force I spoke with, who asked to remain anonymous due to military restrictions on speaking to the press, said he thinks his president is exaggerating the Russian threat.
The public’s disdain for Macron now threatens to taint the centrist 2027 frontrunners, who support bolstering defense within the structures of the EU and NATO: Most of the pro-militarization, pro-cooperation candidates, like former Prime Minister Gabriel Attal and Le Havre Mayor Édouard Philippe, served under Macron, and may not be able distance themselves enough from the president to be seen as delivering the “radical change” that a majority of French people now say they want.
Unfortunately, the radical change that Mélenchon or Le Pen are proposing—backing off from European military cooperation, or loosening ties to NATO—isn’t solely the French populists’ dream. It’s Moscow’s.
In June 2024, five coffins were placed under the Eiffel Tower. Covered in the French tricolor flag, they bore a message: “French soldiers of Ukraine.” In October, four Bulgarians were arrested in Paris for vandalizing the Mémorial de la Shoah, the premier Holocaust museum. Both incidents are suspected to have been Russian-sponsored to sow division.
As one European official told The New Yorker, the subterfuge Russia is waging across Europe can be boiled down to one instruction: vote far-right. “It’s getting dangerous with these warmongers in office,” the official said, summarizing the message to French citizens. “You’re putting yourselves at risk. So you better go and vote for, say, Marine Le Pen’s party in France or the AfD” (Alternative for Germany, which—like the RN in France—has criticized Western support for Ukraine). In other words, Putin’s operatives promote the line that Ukraine’s battle “maybe, isn’t—or shouldn’t be—our war,” Polish academic Paulina Piasecka said, and far-right parties have echoed it.
Public resistance to boosting defense budgets is also intense in Spain, Italy, and elsewhere in Western Europe. But the French, holding continental Europe’s only independent nuclear arsenal, are particularly predisposed to believing that the bloodshed in Ukraine shouldn’t be their country’s problem.
The reality is that the heroism of the Ukrainian military is Europe’s strongest defense against Russia today. “Now we just try to keep the Ukrainians in the game until something in Moscow changes—someone dies or is thrown out the window, or the economy collapses,” Claudia Major, a defense expert with the German Marshall Fund, told The New York Times.
Each day the war drags on costs the Kremlin. Despite the financial boost Trump gave Putin with his war in Iran, the Russian economy remains in the “death zone,” according to Alexandra Prokopenko, a fellow at the Carnegie Russia Eurasia Center. In April, Sweden’s intelligence chief warned that Russia’s central bank was underestimating inflation—meaning the country’s economic situation is more dire than the Kremlin’s official data shows. And in early May, Forbes reported that the campaign of strikes Ukraine is waging inside Russia, with newfound long-range drone and missile capacity, has Putin bunker hopping. (Alongside the losses, however, Russia has also gained battlefield experience now “unmatched by any other military” in Europe apart from Ukraine.)
Holding continental Europe’s only nuclear arsenal, the French are particularly predisposed to believing that the bloodshed in Ukraine shouldn’t be their problem. But the heroism of the Ukrainian military is Europe’s strongest defense against Russia today.
Macron’s terms have primed his public to reject the globalization they feel shafted by, the institutions and alliances they see as its arbiters, and defense spending proposals that would put added economic strain on them or their government to prepare for what some see as a distant menace. If those sentiments grow between now and the April 2027 presidential election, French voters could put their country and continent in jeopardy: A far-right or far-left French President could shatter any hope of strategic autonomy for the EU, and leave NATO flailing.
To quote Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, “Some in Europe may be frustrated with Brussels. But let’s be clear—if not Brussels, then Moscow. It’s your decision. That’s geopolitics. That’s history.” Or, translated into meme-speak, Macron’s reforms were unpopular, for sure, and might well be re-reformed, for sure. But it’s not a great sign that some of France’s most popular politicians tell their voters what Putin wants to hear. And until the French government finds a way to address the immediate needs of working-class people, those constituents will be all too willing to listen.
That, of course, is what happened in the United States with the election and then the reelection of Donald Trump. American voters chose the self-destructive nationalism that France is contemplating. Yet now, Trump’s popularity is collapsing: While GOP voters still favor his tariffs, war of choice in Iran, and stiff-arming Ukraine and NATO, that Republican support is softening. Meanwhile, Democrats and independents overwhelmingly oppose those policies.
Trump’s approval ratings are lower than those of any president in decades at this point in their term, including Richard Nixon before he resigned. The GOP has lost nearly every consequential election for over a year and—disfranchisement notwithstanding—stands to lose the House this fall. If Trump can’t turn his numbers around, a Democrat could well succeed him in 2028. That leader would represent a base committed to the alliances that yielded the era of increased peace and prosperity blithely enjoyed by Western critics of multilateralism today.
Unfortunately, given France’s 2027 lineup, the same may not be said of Macron’s successor.
