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PARIS — The EU’s working language may still be English, but the bloc is thinking a lot more in French.
Nearly four years after Emmanuel Macron won France’s presidential election, the EU has inched closer to his vision of a more sovereign and more fiscally integrated bloc.
Some of that is due to chance. Brexit removed a heavyweight champion of economic liberalism and opponent of greater integration from the EU. The coronavirus pandemic has prompted the bloc to embrace more radical ideas.
But some of it is by design — down to a concerted push from Macron himself to exert greater influence on the EU. And central to that push has been Clément Beaune, the once-soft-spoken adviser who has emerged from the shadows of the Elysée to become an omnipresent junior minister for European affairs.
Beaune co-wrote the 2017 Sorbonne speech in which Macron, just a few months into his presidential term, set out an ambitious vision of European integration. Then Macron’s Europe adviser, Beaune pulled an all-nighter with the French president to get it done and sent European partners a sneak preview of the text at around 5 a.m. on September 26, 2017.
“They must’ve thought we were mad,” Beaune recalled in his corner office overlooking the Seine River, on the second floor of the foreign ministry.
The speech’s opening line was an accurate preview of the years to come: “I came to talk to you about Europe. Some will say: ‘Again?’ They’d better get used to it.”
By no means has all of the Sorbonne speech become reality. But the EU these days feels decidedly more French.
The EU’s landmark €750 billion recovery fund fulfilled a long-held French ambition to create common European debt, an idea once fiercely resisted by Germany. On industrial policy, the union has tilted toward a more interventionist approach. European Commission plans to regulate online commerce and content bear a strong French imprint.
Macron is also the political godfather of the EU leadership team installed in 2019. And it’s Macronian buzzwords such as “strategic autonomy,” “digital sovereignty,” and a “Europe that protects” that drive much of the policy debate in Brussels and many of the European Commission’s legislative proposals.
That’s not to say France is running the show. Germany remains the EU’s most powerful member and generally gets what it wants. But it is often Paris that’s prodding Berlin and other European partners, sometimes grudgingly, into action.
It remains to be seen how many of Macron’s ideas will turn into concrete policies. Some of his most eye-catching initiatives are currently more rhetoric than reality. Others have taken significant hits. His goal of an ambitious European Defence Fund suffered a blow in budget negotiations last year. His cherished Conference on the Future of Europe has struggled to get off the ground and looks certain to be less radical than he had hoped.
But EU officials, diplomats and analysts say Macron has put a greater emphasis on working at the EU level than any of his recent predecessors — building alliances among governments and inside the European Parliament. And he will have the chance to increase his influence even further when Angela Merkel steps down after Germany’s election in September.
“France is back with Macron, that’s 100 percent real,” said a Dutch official working in the EU. “By not acting French, they’ve made Europe more French.”
Macron’s man
Beaune, who is 39, first served as Macron’s main adviser on Europe when the now-president was minister of the economy in 2014. He was appointed junior minister for European affairs in July 2020, fulfilling a long-standing ambition.
Beaune grew up in a middle-class neighborhood in Paris. A bright student, he was advised by one of his teachers to enroll in a middle school with a special curriculum focused on Europe. He chose English as his second language, which he speaks fluently but with a strong French accent. That wasn’t always the case.
“When I was 4 years old, my father, an academic, got a position at Vanderbilt University in the U.S., so we lived in Tennessee for a year,” Beaune said. “There, every day at school, I started the day by singing the American national anthem.”
His American accent vanished in the hallways of his Parisian education, but he retains a special affection for “The Star-Spangled Banner” — as he confessed on Twitter on Joe Biden’s inauguration day, attracting the derision of some trolls.
To the surprise of many who knew him as a discreet presidential adviser, Beaune’s bold use of Twitter has been a hallmark of his transformation into a frontline politician. It has also created tension, inside and outside government.
Other government members do not appreciate a colleague, officially a mere junior minister, grabbing the limelight. And his hard-line statements on the post-Brexit trade deal annoyed Brexiteers and British officials.
“He appears to be Macron’s Mini-Me and looks as if he is trying to make a bit of a reputation for himself by being beastly to the Brits. To be honest, he hasn’t made much impact this side of the Channel,” said one Brexiteer Conservative MP, a former minister who asked not to be named.
Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s office asked the Elysée to get him to tone down his tweets on Brexit, according to two French officials. That request went unfulfilled.
Beaune’s outspoken style has also irked close allies. The German Foreign Ministry made clear it did not appreciate his call this month to abandon the Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline project between Russia and Germany over the imprisonment of Russian opposition figure Alexei Navalny, according to two other French officials.
But Beaune clearly enjoys the confidence of Macron. In his office, along with a picture with former Irish Prime Minister Leo Varadkar and an Amy Winehouse limited-edition singles collection, Beaune keeps a photo of Macron’s MEPs, signed by the president. “For Clément, to whom I owe so much for his work and action,” the inscription reads.
That does not mean Macron has always given Beaune what he wanted. Beaune did not get a spot on Macron’s list of candidates for the European Parliament, was not picked as France’s nominee for the European Commission, and missed out on the ministerial post in a previous reshuffle.
The only time Beaune demurred during multiple interviews with POLITICO in his office across the Seine from the Elysée Palace was when asked about the reasons Macron gave him for preferring others at these various junctures.
“Life is inventive,” he said philosophically after some prodding. “Had I gotten appointed to government earlier, I wouldn’t have experienced with such intensity the two biggest moments, the casting of the EU top jobs and the recovery plan.”
Beaune has built personal relationships with some other European leaders, which is rare for someone in his position. He has gone clubbing in Paris with Luxembourg Prime Minister Xavier Bettel and his husband. He was received personally by Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte on a recent trip to the Hague.
He also retains closes ties with sherpas, the national officials who prepare the summits for their leaders, from his time in their ranks.
But, having been appointed a minister during the pandemic, he hasn’t had much chance to get to know his current EU counterparts. One thing, however, prompted many of them to reach out to Beaune — his coming out in a gay magazine.
“European counterparts of mine very quickly reacted, sharing their coming out stories,” Beaune said. “It quickly creates a bond. European ties aren’t just seeing someone in a negotiation, it’s talking to them every week, or month, and so knowing something personal about them helps.”
Smaller groups
With the help of Beaune, Macron has shown an ability to build alliances with other EU members — something previous French governments have struggled to do. Sometimes that means forming coalitions with like-minded countries to advance a proposal, even if others — including Berlin — do not initially sign up to the idea.
That doesn’t sit well with some governments, particularly in the east of the Continent.
“Macron spends relatively little time on bringing in the Central and Eastern Europeans — he does it more than previous presidents but still not enough,” said Daniela Schwarzer, director of the German Council on Foreign Relations. “The French reflex is, if 27 is simply too complicated, let’s move ahead in smaller groups. But from a German perspective, that’s not the preferred way.”
Still, the method has yielded results.
In a discussion paper tied to an EU summit in the Romanian city of Sibiu in May 2019, France and seven other countries set out climate goals that would evolve into the European Council agreeing, in December of that year, to making the bloc climate neutral by 2050.
Macron used the same method again last year as the Continent was gripped by the coronavirus and EU members bickered over how to handle it and how to finance the economic recovery from the crisis.
On the eve of a virtual EU summit last March, France and eight other countries sent a letter calling for a more collective economic response by the bloc, including a specific reference to common debt instruments — an option vehemently opposed by Germany during the eurozone crisis.
This time, however, Merkel was open to persuasion, aware of the huge damage that could be done to the European project and to the German economy if Europe did not step in to provide help to hard-hit major eurozone economies such as Italy and Spain.
Beaune worked closely with Merkel’s Europe adviser, Uwe Corsepius, to draft a Franco-German plan for a €500 billion recovery fund, financed through EU debt, which formed the basis of the final €750 billion blueprint agreed by heads of state and government at a marathon summit last July.
Tight trio
Beaune is one of a trio of French officials who work closely to connect the Elysée palace to EU policymaking in Brussels and other European capitals.
Garance Pineau, who worked to forge alliances between Macron’s La République En Marche (LREM) and other European parties, is now Beaune’s chief of staff. Stéphane Séjourné, who remains a key political adviser to Macron, was the LREM campaign manager for the 2019 European elections and now leads the party’s delegation in the European Parliament.
Pineau was responsible for an early Macron victory on the EU stage — although it came at a price.
As an adviser to France’s then-labor minister, she was at the heart of a successful push by Paris to tighten the rules in the Posted Workers Directive that govern EU workers temporarily working in another part of the bloc, such as long-haul truckers.
The issue had become a political lightning rod in the EU’s richer countries, especially France, where complaints of intra-European social dumping were souring blue-collar workers on the EU.
France presented its move as an effort to protect the rights of workers. For Macron, it was an important sign to French voters that the EU could deliver for them.
But Central and Eastern Europeans saw it as an effort to push out cheaper rival truckers from places like Poland and Romania while favoring more expensive drivers from Western Europe.
Central and Eastern Europeans have also been unimpressed by Macron’s efforts to forge closer ties with Russian President Vladimir Putin.
“The issue that led to the most distrust, in terms of method, it’s the dialogue with Russia,” Beaune admitted. “Our partners perceived it as us putting them in front of a fait accompli.”
Beaune has tried to do damage control, explaining the policy to officials and think tankers in the region. But not with great success.
Power base
Back in Brussels, however, the trio has succeeded in constructing a power base for Macron inside key institutions — after a faltering start.
Having built his own political movement from scratch, Macron originally tried to do the same at the European level rather than join one of the Continent’s big political families.
He pushed for transnational candidate lists in the European Parliament elections, an idea from the Sorbonne speech that he argued would foster pan-European democracy. It would also have allowed a Macron-backed slate to compete across the Continent.
To great fanfare, he launched a movement called Renaissance with the aim of forming alliances with parties around the EU. There was talk of luring major parties away from the big blocs, such as the European People’s Party and Socialists & Democrats.
But the European Parliament rejected transnational lists. And Renaissance attracted some small parties from around Europe but no big fish.
“The transnational lists were not well-prepared,” Pineau conceded. “We thought we would be more attractive [than we were] and we could have attracted parties from within EPP and S&D to create a real central group that’s even more powerful than what we are.”
LREM ended up joining forces with the liberal ALDE group in the European Parliament to create a new centrist faction, Renew Europe. Macron’s party is the biggest in the group, giving it a considerable platform from which to pursue its agenda.
Macron’s MEPs have tried taking a leaf out of the German playbook of closely matching national leaders’ priorities to the work of the European Parliament and pushing to have their key policies adopted in the European Commission’s work program. Having campaigned on 79 proposals, the French delegation within Renew now keeps track of their progress in a table with red, orange and green coding in an Excel sheet.
In an interview, Séjourné said 32 of those proposals went unchanged into the Commission’s program for its five-year term, including minimum wage plans, an AI investment strategy and an outline for the Conference on the Future of Europe.
Séjourné is Macron’s point man within the parliamentary group. He pushed a resolution passed by the Parliament in April 2020 in favor joint debt, intended to pave the way for what became the recovery fund. And he reported to Macron directly afterwards on how national EU leaders’ parties had voted.
“I sent the president a message on Telegram recapping the votes of the political parties present in the Council to tell him exactly the gains that were made,” Séjourné said. He received a swift reply, underscoring how closely Macron was following proceedings.
Beaune, Pineau and Séjourné are now turning their attention to France’s presidency of the Council of the EU, which will begin in January 2022.
It will not only be Macron’s big European showcase. With the French presidential election taking place in April, it will be vital to Macron’s reelection chances to be able to point to concrete ways his European focus has benefited French citizens.
Issues like the EU minimum wage legislation, labor rights for tech workers and the regulation of global supply chains will be high on the agenda.
Beaune won’t be happy with the EU just thinking more in French. He’d like to change the way it speaks too. If everyone won’t speak the language of Molière, he would at least like them to speak less English.
“It will be harder for people to understand, after Brexit, that we all stick to a type of broken English,” he said last month. “Let’s get used to speaking our languages again!”
Jacopo Barigazzi, Lili Bayer, Charlie Cooper, Maia de La Baume and Hans von der Burchard contributed reporting.
