Emmanuel Macron, President of France
May 9th, 2017In the very first Hungarian press commentary on the outcome of the presidential election in France, a pro-government analyst hopes that Emmanuel Macron will not make good on his campaign promise to fine unruly EU member countries.
In his Magyar Idők editorial, Zoltán Kottász takes it for granted that international liberal forces will greet Macron’s victory over Marine Le Pen enthusiastically as a victory of the ‘European mainstream over populism’. This stands in marked contrast, he suggests, to the way they approach the arrival in power of new governments that represent views differing from their own. They describe international politics as a lethal clash between good and evil and ‘give no chance to those who do not conform to their views’. The victory of the right wing in Poland was immediately met with a mass demonstration, Great Britain is described as doomed because of Brexit, a ‘resistance movement’ was organised in the United States as soon as President Trump took the oath of office, while Prime Minister Orbán of Hungary has been accused again and again of anti-Semitism – ‘a useful trump card, when one runs out of arguments’. Kottász recommends Hungarian right-wingers to adapt a very different approach to Macron and hope for the best. In the first place, he hopes that Macron’s promise to impose sanctions on countries, including Hungary which ‘don’t comply with the principles of the European Union’ was only ‘a populist slogan in the heat of the campaign’.