STRANGE D DAY!

Achtung! Macron lands in Normandy! With six speeches in three days!

From June 5th to 7th, the President will celebrate the 80th anniversary of the Landing as a consummate performer, a timely occasion: making us forget the announced debacle of his troops in the European elections, just two days later...

We know Macron loves the sound of his own voice; he savors every word, every intonation of his interminable speeches. He revels in his memorial wanderings, this glorious museum of French History from which he picks, as he pleases, what he uses to hide the misery of our current decline: Invalides, Pantheon, Villers-Cotterêts, the trenches of 1914, the Plateau des Glières... but this time, what exactly is he commemorating?

The downgrade of France's credit rating by Standard & Poor’s, which fell awkwardly on the eve of the June 6th celebrations? The Kanaks in revolt, or the Germans drifting away, two other Macronian journeys in recent days? A government, which, lacking a majority, can no longer govern and entertains with dubious innovations on end-of-life matters? Our universities prey to Hamas propaganda, or Paris, the once most beautiful city in the world, disfigured by the hideous scaffolding for the Olympics?

In the past, I mean until Mitterrand's election, De Gaulle forbade himself from celebrating this June 6th, from which Roosevelt and Churchill had excluded him, planning to make France an American-controlled zone. For the General, only his landing on the 14th, at Courseulles then Bayeux, mattered: the true return of France!

Mitterrand in 1984 had the brilliant idea, coupled with a snub to De Gaulle, to turn June 6th, where France had only served as a bloody battlefield, into an international event with Reagan and Thatcher, celebrating the victory of freedom over totalitarianism. Then, 20 years later, in 2004, Chirac invited Putin: the 23 million Soviet dead were well worth the gesture. Hollande repeated in 2014, inviting, three months after the annexation of Crimea, Putin and the new Ukrainian president Poroshenko, inventing the so-called "Normandy format" where France and Germany were to serve as mediators to end the conflict...

We know what happened next.

In this June of 2024, two and a half years after the beginning of the Russian invasion, the war in Ukraine has accelerated the world's descent into both unabashed and widespread violence. While America is fully engaged in its presidential campaign and in condemning Trump, mainly focused on the Middle East in flames and the upcoming conflict in Taiwan, Europe is painfully waking up from thirty years of illusions and unilateral disarmament. It discovers that war has returned, that Ukraine risks being defeated, that facing it, Russia has allied with China, Iran, and North Korea. And that against these four horsemen of the Apocalypse, it risks being alone if Trump were to win on November 5th.

So, this time, we must save Private Zelensky, who is in a bad position today, to whom we had quickly promised, in the enthusiasm of his initial successes, both NATO and EU membership...

On the eve of this June 6th, Macron has therefore preferred the risk of escalation to that of possible negotiation. Putin, and everything Russian, has been banned from these Norman celebrations. Not Zelensky, who is invited. The opportunity to end it through a comprehensive negotiation, which will impose itself one day, has not even been considered. The very word is taboo... On the contrary, it is only a matter of authorizing the Ukrainians to strike Russian territory with American and European missiles, this before the probable sending of European military instructors to Ukraine...

Let us hope that our president, fond of literature, has meditated on the lessons of history: those of 1914, as Erich Maria Remarque reminded us: "All Quiet on the Western Front."

Pierre Lellouche

Tribune VA 2/6/24

EXCLUSIVE ENGLISH TRANSLATION FOR THE BLOG. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED