PARIS — After a difficult summer capped by a short but eventful holiday, Emmanuel Macron will next week try to show European allies that he doesn’t only have eyes for Germany.
The French president will also use a trip through Central and Eastern Europe to show French voters that he hasn’t given up on a key electoral pledge: changing the European Union to make it more “protective” of its citizens — in order to better tackle populism and Euroskepticism.
The French president has long promised to spend part of the summer on a tour of European capitals to explain his proposals to improve the EU and defend his push for reforming the bloc’s controversial directive on posted workers, which he denounced as unfair during his election campaign. However, Macron has a limited schedule with only three stops planned — Austria, Romania and Bulgaria — and a further two EU leaders are traveling to meet the French president.
In Vienna next Wednesday, Macron will meet Austrian Chancellor Christian Kern as well as Czech Prime Minister Bohuslav Sobotka and Slovakia’s Robert Fico. In Bucharest the next day, he will meet Romanian President Klaus Iohannis and Prime Minister Mihai Tudose. Then, on August 25, he will meet President Rumen Radev and Prime Minister Boyko Borisov in Varna, Bulgaria.
A Macron aide insisted the trip “also has a symbolic dimension. [Macron] wants to show France’s intent to rekindle links with the former Eastern Europe after years of neglect” under the presidencies of Nicolas Sarkozy and François Hollande.
The visit comes at a time when Macron’s positions on several issues have irked many Eastern European governments — not just his opposition to the ease with which workers can be sent across the bloc but also his determination to base his European policy around the Franco-German axis, and his warnings to countries such as Poland and Hungary that Europe is based on common values and is “not just a supermarket.”
“There is a lot of common ground we can find on the posted workers issue with the governments we’re meeting next week, even though the French position originally created some alarm,” said a French government official.
Politically sensitive
The posted workers directive, which dates back to 1996, allows European companies to send employees to work in another EU member country while continuing to pay benefits and taxes in their own country. Some, notably in higher-wage countries such as France, argue that this amounts to “social dumping” by allowing companies with lower labor costs to compete unfairly with local firms.
Posted workers represent less than 1 percent of the EU workforce, but the topic has become a big political issue in some capitals.
EU plans for reform have been blocked by a coalition of Eastern European states, some of which denounce Macron’s plans to tighten the rules as protectionist and going against the principles of free movement of labor and services. A meeting of EU labor ministers, scheduled for the end of October, is tasked with coming up with a decision.
Macron will try to convince his partners that he just wants to eliminate fraud and abuse. France also wants the contracts of posted workers to be limited to one year in their destination country — versus two years in the current EU proposal.
However, Poland and Hungary — two countries that have remained immune to the Macron-mania that swept the Continent in the spring — aren’t on the list of stops, and this is where Macron will have to work harder both on the specific issue of posted workers and on wider topics such as building up the EU’s military capabilities, or plans for a two-speed Europe.
There’s ample room for compromise on posted workers by the time of the labor ministers’ meeting in October. “It doesn’t have to be a big major change. However minor the amendments to the current proposal, [Macron] just has to be able to show that he has been able to make Europe somewhat more protective,” said the French government official.
The same official, recalling Macron’s long-time push, dating back to when he was France’s economy minister, to build better EU protections against Chinese imports or against unwanted foreign investments, recalled one of the French president’s mantras to explain his positions.
“I’m a free-trader. But being a liberal doesn’t mean being a moron or a fool.”
CORRECTION: A previous version of this report misidentified Varna, Bulgaria.