Emmanuel Macron’s tricky Christmas present

WHEN EMMANUEL MACRON peers under his Christmas tree this year, he will find that le Père Noël has left him an unusually big, tantalisingly shiny, but awkwardly shaped gift. Call it a year in a present. For 2022 brings a double challenge. From January for six months, France will run the European Union’s rotating jamboree, the presidency of the Council of the EU. Yet Mr Macron is also expected to be campaigning for re-election as French president in April. To run Europe, as the job will doubtless be portrayed at home, as well as France, sounds like a Macron fantasy come true. For other Europeans, the president’s gift, like a toy trumpet, could turn out to be noisy, unpredictable and exhausting.

This is not the first time the rotating presidency coincides with a French election. In 1995 a frail François Mitterrand did a four-month stint, before handing over to his successor, Jacques Chirac, for two. Squads of bureaucrats ensure continuity. These days the rotating EU inter-ministerial presidency is largely procedural. Much of the stuff to be discussed in 2022—the regulation of big tech and hate speech online, an external-border carbon tax, a minimum wage—has been in the works in Brussels for months.