Simon Gros

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After the European Council meeting in Brussels, French President Emmanuel Macron presented the summit as a moment of consolidation for European policy across several interconnected crises: Russia’s war against Ukraine, the instability of the Middle East, migration management, global economic imbalances, China’s industrial and trade practices, and the future financial architecture of the European Union. His remarks linked the Brussels discussions to the preceding G7 summit in Évian, where France had sought to frame European strategy not as a sequence of isolated diplomatic reactions, but as a coordinated attempt to strengthen Europe’s sovereignty, industrial capacity, external credibility, and security posture.

On Ukraine, Macron emphasized that Europe’s position remained anchored in support for Ukrainian sovereignty, military resilience, and long-term security. He said that the European Union was not a mediator in Russia’s war against Ukraine, because it had taken a clear political and strategic position: it was on Ukraine’s side, had supplied assistance to Kyiv, and had imposed sanctions on Russia. For that reason, Europe could not pretend to be neutral between the aggressor and the state whose territory had been invaded. At the same time, Macron argued that any eventual peace negotiation would have to include the Europeans, because the war directly affected European security, European enlargement policy, European financial commitments, and the future system of guarantees that would be required to make any ceasefire or peace settlement durable.

Macron’s distinction was therefore precise. Europe was not to act as an impartial broker, but it had to be present at the table when the political and security architecture of a post-war settlement was discussed. In his account, a negotiation would first have to involve Ukraine and Russia, while the United States and the Europeans would also have to be associated because of their military, financial, diplomatic, and security roles. The president of the European Council, António Costa, would have a place within the limits of his institutional competences, but the member states themselves would also have to participate, particularly where security guarantees were concerned. These guarantees could not be delegated entirely to EU institutions because they would involve national defence capacities, military commitments, and the strategic choices of individual governments.

Macron placed particular weight on what he described as a recent shift in the United States’ posture. According to him, Washington had moved toward stronger alignment with Europe and Ukraine by confirming that it would continue supporting Kyiv, increase pressure on Moscow, and strengthen sanctions. In this changed context, Macron argued, the immediate priority was not to debate which European representative should open channels to Russia, but to maintain military support for Ukraine, help Kyiv prepare its energy system for the coming winter, intensify pressure on Russia’s war economy, and remain ready to receive any serious signal from Moscow that it was prepared to negotiate. Up to that point, he said, Russia had not shown such seriousness.

The summit also addressed Ukraine’s and Moldova’s accession processes. Macron described the progress achieved that week as historic, because the opening of the fundamentals cluster marked the formal beginning of accession negotiations in the merit-based enlargement framework. He also referred to engagement between Hungary and Ukraine on the issue of national minorities, presenting it as an element that had helped move Ukraine’s accession process back onto a more constructive institutional path. In this framing, enlargement was not treated as a symbolic gesture alone, but as a structured legal and political process in which candidate countries had to advance through defined chapters while the Union managed internal political disagreements among member states.

Macron also referred to the Coalition of the Willing, the group of countries preparing possible security arrangements for Ukraine. He announced that France had invited all participating countries, whether or not they belonged to the European Union, to Paris for a summit on 13 July. They were also invited to take part the next day in the 14 July military parade alongside Ukrainian forces. The symbolism was clear: France intended to connect the military and diplomatic dimension of support for Ukraine with a public demonstration of solidarity at the centre of the French national calendar. The practical aim, however, was broader: to prepare the framework through which Ukraine could receive robust guarantees when conditions allowed.

On the Middle East, Macron linked the Brussels debate to recent discussions at Évian. He welcomed the memorandum of understanding between the United States and Iran, which, according to his remarks, had opened the way to the end of hostilities, including in Lebanon, and to the reopening of the Strait of Hormuz. He framed this as a diplomatic opportunity rather than a completed settlement. The arrangement still required implementation, verification, and further negotiation on regional security, Iran’s nuclear programme, ballistic capabilities, and destabilising activities. Macron said the Europeans were ready to contribute to implementation, particularly through a multinational military maritime initiative that had been finalised and could be deployed when conditions allowed and at the request of the relevant parties.

The Strait of Hormuz occupied a central place in Macron’s account because it is one of the world’s most strategically important maritime chokepoints. Any closure or militarisation of that passage affects global energy flows, insurance costs, shipping routes, food security, and inflationary pressures. Macron therefore presented European involvement not as a secondary diplomatic gesture, but as part of a broader defence of freedom of navigation and the stability of global trade. The European position, as he described it, was that Iran had to be able to coexist peacefully with its regional environment, but that such coexistence required constraints on its nuclear and ballistic programmes and an end to destabilising action in the Middle East and Europe.

Lebanon was treated as a separate but closely connected file. Macron said that the European position was unanimous: there had to be an immediate ceasefire, Israeli withdrawal from Lebanese territory, the disarmament of Hezbollah, and support for the Lebanese state’s effort to restore the monopoly of weapons to the national armed forces. He referred to Lebanon’s President Joseph Aoun and Prime Minister Nawaf Salam, and said the European Union would mobilise its instruments to strengthen the Lebanese state, its armed forces, and its security services. Macron also said that he had met Salam the previous day and that France would coordinate its work with discussions then under way in Washington between Lebanese and Israeli representatives.

France, according to Macron, intended to organise a support conference in Paris in the following weeks to mobilise international financing for the Lebanese Armed Forces and for reconstruction. The purpose was not only to support immediate stabilisation, but also to prepare arrangements that could substitute for, or continue in a new form, the role played by UNIFIL in southern Lebanon. This reflected a broader French and European concern that Lebanon’s security crisis could not be solved only through border management or military de-escalation, but required the reconstruction of state authority, security-sector capacity, and an internationally supported framework for implementation.

On Gaza, Macron said the assessment was clear: the humanitarian situation was unacceptable and the political process had not advanced sufficiently. He identified the large-scale and unhindered delivery of humanitarian aid as the immediate priority. He also warned that settlement developments in the West Bank, especially the E1 project, were undermining the possibility of a Palestinian state and therefore the two-state solution. His proposed response involved sanctions against violent extremist settlers, European-level sanctions against extremist ministers, and a deeper differentiation between the internationally recognised territory of Israel and illegal settlements. Macron argued that European trade policy had to be aligned with international law, meaning that the legal distinction between Israel proper and occupied settlement areas had to be made operational in policy.

This part of the press conference showed the dual structure of the French position. On one side, Macron continued to refer to the implementation of a peace plan for Gaza and to the need for humanitarian access. On the other side, he also shifted attention to the West Bank, where settlement expansion and extremist violence, in his view, threatened the territorial basis of any future Palestinian state. The Gaza war was therefore not treated merely as a humanitarian emergency, but as part of a wider collapse of the political conditions necessary for a negotiated Israeli-Palestinian settlement.

A second major axis of Macron’s remarks concerned global macroeconomic imbalances. He said that the problem had been clearly described by the International Monetary Fund, by experts mobilised for the G7, and by European leaders during their discussions. In his analysis, Europe had its own responsibilities: it had to improve competitiveness, simplify regulation, and increase investment. But the United States and China also had to address structural problems. For the United States, Macron pointed to the need to reduce twin deficits. For China, he referred to monetary issues, excessive subsidies, and insufficient domestic consumption. The underlying diagnosis was that global instability was not only military or diplomatic, but also industrial, monetary, and macroeconomic.

Macron argued that Europe needed to become faster and more effective in this environment. He said that the Union still had excessive dependencies in many areas and that some sectors were experiencing accelerated deindustrialisation because of unfair competition, particularly from China. He rejected both protectionism and passivity. His preferred formula was a policy of fair protection: the Union should defend open trade where competition was legitimate, but it should also use trade-defence instruments when foreign subsidies, dumping, forced dependencies, or asymmetrical market access threatened European industry.

The French president placed special emphasis on strategic sectors. He said Europe had to use the leverage of the internal market, assume European preference in strategic domains where appropriate, impose clearer conditions on foreign direct investment, require real technology transfer, and secure local employment. Short-term measures such as safeguard clauses and European preference mechanisms had to be strengthened and extended where necessary. Longer-term policy required diversification in critical minerals and rare earths, because these resources are essential for defence, batteries, clean technologies, semiconductors, robotics, and advanced manufacturing.

Macron connected this European strategy to the G7 agreement on critical minerals. He said the G7 had, for the first time in that framework, reached an agreement with the United States to reduce dependency on critical minerals and rare earths, and that nearly 200 common projects had been identified with total investment slightly above €60 billion. The objective was to prevent industrial sovereignty from becoming impossible because of concentrated supply chains. In practice, the challenge was not merely to mine raw materials, but to build processing, refining, recycling, stockpiling, and manufacturing capacity across the entire value chain.

He also stressed the need for the rapid adoption of an Industrial Accelerator Act, which he presented as a tool to help European industry maintain employment and preserve control over innovation. In the same logic, he called for progress on securitisation, single supervision, and a genuine European capital and investment market. These financial reforms were not described as technical matters alone. Macron treated them as necessary conditions for industrial strategy, because Europe could not compete in artificial intelligence, quantum technology, clean technologies, defence, or space without larger, deeper, and more integrated capital markets capable of funding high-risk industrial scale-up.

The next long-term EU budget, covering 2028 to 2034, was therefore presented as a structural test of European sovereignty. Macron said the discussion had entered a substantive phase through the quantified negotiating box proposed by the Cypriot presidency. On expenditure, France wanted the common budget to respond to the challenges of sovereignty and security while preserving traditional policies such as the Common Agricultural Policy, fisheries policy, support for outermost regions, and cohesion policy. At the same time, the budget had to invest in sectors decisive for Europe’s future: defence, space, artificial intelligence, quantum technologies, and clean technologies.

Macron argued that an increase in EU-level investment was consistent with the macroeconomic diagnosis he had just made. Europe needed to invest more, but such an increase also required greater collective efficiency, clear governance, and the full involvement of member states in defining objectives. He referred in particular to the modernisation and competitiveness fund, where excellence criteria and national participation had to be properly incorporated. On the revenue side, he said the Union had to prioritise new own resources in order to stabilise national contributions. Without such resources, he warned, a balanced agreement on the budget would be difficult.

He also welcomed partial agreements reached that week on three basic regulations for the future financial framework. These agreements, he said, would help preserve the Common Agricultural Policy, fisheries policy, and specific support for the outermost regions, including the POSEI programme. He added that further work was required to preserve gains on technological neutrality, European preference in defence, and the role of member states in governance. Development aid, in his view, had to remain oriented toward Europe’s external influence, partnerships, solidarity investment, and the defence of European interests with countries of the Global South. It should not be redirected toward policies that did not belong to development cooperation.

This point became central when Macron was asked about migration. He confirmed that the European Council had agreed to hold a strategic discussion on migration in October. France, he said, supported a rigorous policy that reduced illegal migration, accelerated procedures, improved European coordination, and enabled the return of people who had no legal right to remain in Europe. He presented this as consistent with both law and public expectations. He also recalled that France’s EU presidency had helped unblock the migration file in 2022 after years of paralysis, eventually contributing to the Pact on Migration and Asylum.

Macron said the Pact would allow the Union to better control arrivals, register people more efficiently, process asylum and migration cases faster, and return those who did not qualify for protection or residence. France, he noted, had itself toughened aspects of its law in response to migration pressure. However, he sharply rejected the proposal for return centres or return hubs in third countries. He said France did not support such a policy because he had not seen it work in practice and because it raised serious legal, ethical, and diplomatic questions. The model, as he described it, would involve transferring people who could not be returned to their country of origin into a third country, possibly in exchange for money. Macron questioned what relationship that would create, what human-rights framework would apply, and whether such a policy corresponded to the principles on which Europe had been built.

He made clear that France would not implement such centres and that he would oppose the use of the European budget, especially funds intended for international partnerships and development, to finance them. In his view, it would damage Europe’s credibility with Africa and other regions if money presented as solidarity investment were redirected toward facilities designed to receive people expelled from Europe. He said he respected countries that wanted to pursue such national policies, but he disagreed with them both pragmatically and in principle. The French position, therefore, was yes to stricter and more effective migration management, but no to EU-financed third-country return hubs.

The final major theme was China. Macron said there had been a European awakening on the issue, and that the debate had moved closer to the position France had defended for months. He described the approach not as hostility and not as decoupling, but as derisking. Europe did not want to separate its economy from China’s; it wanted to reduce excessive dependencies and protect itself against unfair competition. Macron said the evidence was visible in sectors such as machine tools and automobiles, where European employment had been damaged. He pointed to European action on electric vehicles as an example of trade-defence measures that could regulate competition and protect European manufacturers.

He also argued that existing instruments were too slow. Sector by sector, companies or governments had to request investigations from the European Commission, and such investigations could take twelve to eighteen months. In that time, firms could already be driven out of the market. Macron cited amino acids and agricultural nutrition as examples, linking the issue to production near Amiens, his birthplace. In his description, a competitive European producer could be hit by Chinese dumping, request an investigation, and then lose market position month after month while the procedure remained under way. This was why, he said, the Commission needed a mandate to design faster and more effective tools, capable of responding at the moment when suspicions of unfair competition and market-distorting behaviour appeared.

At the same time, Macron did not present China only as a threat. He acknowledged that Chinese firms had advanced rapidly in innovation, particularly in green technologies and robotics, and that some Chinese industrial solutions were relevant and technologically strong. For that reason, he argued that Europe’s policy should also involve demanding technology transfer and local job creation when Chinese investment entered European markets. The objective was not to exclude Chinese actors mechanically, but to ensure reciprocity, reduce distortions, and prevent Europe from becoming merely a consumer market for technologies and products whose strategic value was controlled elsewhere.

Taken together, Macron’s press conference presented a coherent interpretation of Europe’s strategic position in mid-2026. The Union was dealing simultaneously with war on its eastern flank, regional escalation in the Middle East, the humanitarian and political crisis in Gaza, migration pressure, global trade imbalances, Chinese overcapacity, and the need to finance its own industrial and defence transformation. Macron’s answer to these pressures was not withdrawal, neutrality, or unqualified openness. It was a model of European sovereignty based on support for Ukraine, conditional diplomacy with adversarial or destabilising powers, stricter migration procedures within legal limits, stronger trade-defence mechanisms, industrial acceleration, new capital mobilisation, and a budget capable of preserving traditional European policies while funding the technologies and capabilities that would define Europe’s future autonomy.