Emmanuel Macron's China visit: How the French president missed an opportunity to cement ties with India

The visits of president Jacques Chirac to Delhi in January 1998 and prime minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee’s subsequent trip to Paris later in the year brought a tremendous boost to India’s foreign relations at the end of the 1990s. He said that he had come to show that “France wanted to accompany India in its potent march.” Inaugurating a seminar in Vigyan Bhavan, the French president elaborated on the nuclear deal. We must use this opportunity to write a new chapter in our strategic partnership in all of the fields that have contributed to its excellence thus far, such as defense, space, nuclear energy, maritime security and, more generally speaking, cooperation on security issues.” A French spokesman added: “Our countries have developed in a wide range of strategic fields, ranging from submarines to combat aviation and climate change, via the International Solar Alliance.” A State visit to celebrate the partnership? The New York Times noted: “President Emmanuel Macron landed in China to a red-carpet reception and all the pomp of a state visit, a three-day tour little short of a love-fest that he clearly hoped would further his ambitions for France to sit at the table of the great powers in a world changed by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and Beijing’s emergence as an arbiter of global conflict. But Mr. Macron’s reception on returning to Europe has been chilly.” The US newspaper’s conclusions were: “Already embattled at home, facing huge weekly protests in the streets, he now finds himself excoriated abroad for what has been criticized as his naïveté.” It cited the French president’s contacts with President Putin: “whom he failed to dissuade from war after an intense courtship” and with President Xi Jinping, “who wants to drive a wedge between Europe and the United States.” For The New York Times, the trip “has left the French president more isolated than at any time in his six-year presidency, unpopular in France and mistrusted beyond it as he attempts to reshape not only his own country but also the foundations of whatever international order will emerge after the war in Ukraine.” It is difficult to comment on the decisions on French internal affairs as a reform of the pensions was undoubtedly long overdue and no politician could have escaped introducing a change in the length of working years.