The assessment of France’s six-month Presidency of the Council has been mostly positive. It brokered a record 130 agreements and played a key role in the EU’s response to the war in Ukraine.
EU
leaders were full of praise. France has delivered – and delivered well.
Not everyone agrees, however. Some EU capitals resent France for
trying to cover too much in too little time – meetings became longer and
were more frequent, and France’s ambitious drive was sometimes a source
of irritation. For others, President Macron’s comments on the war in
Ukraine were particularly problematic.
Despite the war, France achieved many of its objectives
France’s presidency was ambitious and included over 60 priorities,
covering everything from climate and digital to defence cooperation.
This isn’t a total surprise. Over the past five years, the French
government has worked relentlessly to implement Macron’s ‘2017 Sorbonne agenda’, designed to make the EU more powerful, more sovereign and a more capable actor.
France inherited 350 legislative files at the start of its Council
presidency. It managed to get the 27 EU governments to agree to over 100
legislative proposals and helped reach 30 trilogue agreements with the
European Commission and the European Parliament – by comparison, the
2020 Portuguese Presidency concluded 23 agreements and 78 trilogues.
Some key legislative wins
include guiding legislation on a national minimum wage and equal wages;
an agreement on the carbon border adjustment mechanism; new legislation
to better regulate digital services and ensure fair competition in the
digital market; and some progress on the asylum and immigration pact.
On Ukraine, France helped the EU to respond with speed and
efficiency, notably on sanctions against Russia and Belarus. Paris
helped coordinate the EU’s response to resettle Ukrainian refugees. It
also got Member States to agree to modify Eurojust’s mandate, enabling
it to send officers to Ukraine to investigate alleged Russian war
crimes.
France supported the work of the High Representative in delivering the Strategic Compass, the EU’s latest defence white paper. Macron also put forward the notion of a European Political Community
to bring EU countries and non-EU neighbours closer together to discuss
Europe-wide issues. While initially dismissed, EU Member States, as well
as countries like Ukraine, Moldova and those in the Western Balkans,
now seem more open to explore the idea.
To prepare is to succeed
The success of a presidency is of course a team effort – it depends
on the work of preceding presidencies and on how sympathetic EU
institutions and Member States are to what the presidency-holder is
hoping to achieve.
To secure their support, France initiated a huge outreach campaign in
the two years before its presidency with Member State governments, EU
institutions and French civil society. Overall, this paid off.
By the time France took the reins, its views of EU sovereignty had
become more readily accepted. It gained traction during the pandemic and
is now widely associated with defence, but also energy, food, and the
need for greater investment in key European industries.
The notion of the EU as a defence power also saw the first ever case
of direct EU military assistance to a third country under the European Peace Facility. The question was no longer whether the EU should act, but how – and many in Paris believe this would not have been possible without a strong French push.
Not all feedback is positive
But France’s ambition was also the source of much irritation. Some
felt France was trying to pack too much into its six months. Instead of
readjusting the workload to deal with the Ukraine war, France simply
added more meetings. While it has a large bureaucracy to deal with this,
many smaller Member States do not and struggled to keep up.
France also struggled to shake off suspicions that it was using the
presidency for electoral aims. For example, some capitals felt rushed
and pressurised into agreeing legislation on digital services before the
start of France’s presidential campaign. Others even criticised France
for securing easy wins, while setting aside tough decisions, such as the
revision of the EU’s emissions trading system and fairer burden sharing
for the rehousing of migrants in the EU. These decisions have been left
to the Czech Presidency. France also failed to make progress on the
EU’s trade deals....
130 agreements
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