At the start of his last year in full office at the Élysée, Emmanuel Macron is a weakened president. Weakened on the internal level, first of all: without a majority, without political dynamics, without a credible relay in public opinion and without a mobilizing project. Weakened externally, then: France has lost visibility, credibility and strategic centrality since 2017, in a world that has hardened, bilateralized and brutally hierarchized. Where Paris claimed to embody a “third way”, today it appears more like a peripheral actor, often listened to out of politeness, rarely followed out of conviction.
In this context, the question is no longer whether Emmanuel Macron can “mark” international history in the home stretch, but simply whether he can still exist diplomatically somewhere, at the margins, in the corners of a weakened international system where France is no more than a middle power in the process of relative downgrading.
Europe: from structuring ambition to management of decline
The European project was the ideological heart of Macronism. It is today its political cemetery. The Franco-German axis is weakened, Berlin is looking elsewhere, Central Europe is imposing its security priorities, and Washington remains the real strategic center of gravity. As for London, the relationship between France and Great Britain is getting back on track, but a little late with Brexit.
Macron can still try to achieve some technical advances, on European defense, common industrial capabilities or military financing, but he is no longer able to impose a vision on other member states.
“Macron is neither mediator, nor arbitrator, nor peacemaker”
France is no longer the engine, but rather a brake. And in a Union dominated by Eastern security logics and Atlanticist alignment, the French discourse on strategic autonomy appears more and more like an intellectual vestige of the 2010s. Should we remember that Macron spoke of a NATO “ brain dead » before Russia started the war in Ukraine? We should almost thank Putin for his excesses and his errors.
Ukraine-Russia: skin-deep diplomacy
The announced resumption of contacts between Emmanuel Macron and Vladimir Putin, even limited, is revealing. It does not reflect a return of France as a central actor, but rather the fact that Paris still occupies a space left vacant: that of minimal conversation with Moscow, where others in Europe have severed all links. However, Trump is right: this is not the United States’ war.
Macron is neither mediator, nor arbitrator, nor peacemaker. It is at best a secondary channel and a relay of more than shared European wishes. He cannot weigh alone in the face of so many divisions. Its diplomacy is not that of conflict resolution, but that of preventing an uncontrolled slide and an exit for Europe at lower cost and lower risk. It is a diplomacy of the residue: useful but quite insufficient in view of the issues at stake.
Arab world, Africa, Asia: the last peripheral areas of French influence
It is outside the heart of the Western system that France still retains some latitude to try to exert influence. In the Arab world, Paris remains audible to certain actors in the Gulf, in Lebanon, Egypt and in the countries undergoing post-Gaza reorganization. But here again, France is no longer a decision-making center, only one player among others in a saturated diplomatic market. The days of Jacques Chirac, who was affectionately nicknamed “the Arab”, are long gone.
In Africa, the downgrading is more brutal. The French military decline, accumulated resentments, Russian, Turkish and Chinese competition have profoundly marginalized Paris. France was kicked out. Macron can attempt a “ refoundation » symbolic, but it no longer has the levers to impose its terms. It is too late and the jihadist danger is too great and far too established now in the former countries under French influence.
Finally, in Asia, France exists mainly through its bilateral partnerships and its Indo-Pacific presence, but without any real regional structuring capacity. Our maritime space is immense and can weigh in on the geopolitical shift of global tensions towards the Pacific, but nothing more.
Emmanuel Macron’s last year will not be that of a comeback, but that of end-of-cycle management. It will not weigh by its results, but by its ability not to completely disappear from the international radar. His real challenge now perhaps lies elsewhere: preparing his international personal future with a very valuable address book. A position in a multilateral organization, a foundation, a large global institution, would be a coherent exit for a president who has invested his entire political identity in the international arena to make people forget the internal political slump into which he has plunged France. And, hopefully, at the same time, an elegant way of keeping a distance, after 2027, from Franco-French political life, which he has profoundly contributed to imploding.
* Sébastien Boussois is a media consultant and columnist, doctor in political science, researcher specializing in the Arab world and international relations, director of the European Geopolitical Institute (IGE) associated with the CNAM Paris (Defense Security Team) and the Geostrategic Observatory of Geneva (Switzerland).
