Emmanuel Macron’s mission to impress the United Nations this week was made easier by following Donald Trump. The French president’s impassioned defence of multilateral cooperation based on universal human rights was a rebuke to his US counterpart’s bombastic unilateralism. Earlier the same day, Mr Trump’s denunciation of “globalism” earned a cool reception.
Ardent internationalism is Mr Macron’s preferred style, and he does it well. A substantial part of his winning election pitch against Marine Le Pen of the far-right National Front in 2017 was defence of the European project. He sees himself as a figurehead for a continent-wide repulsion of populists, and hopes to engineer a “progressive” coalition in the European parliament due to be elected next May. At the UN he took his message worldwide, urging a renewal of global governance – “a new world order with a human face”.
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