Macron Blames Past Crises for France's Economic Woes Amid Diesel Reserve Release Pressure from Trump

So, big bad US President Donald Trump just successfully strong-armed French President Emmanuel Macron and the EU into dumping their precious ‘rainy day’ diesel from strategic reserves.

Why? Because Trump, threatening a disastrous cutoff of diesel exports to Europe altogether, wanted to keep domestic gas prices looking perky ahead of next month’s American midterms.

“We have decided to release strategic reserves of diesel and crude oil, under the coordination of the International Energy Agency – which will meet in the coming hours or days to organize this… This process will begin by prioritizing diesel,” Macron declared.

Wait, aren’t those the exact same strategic reserves that have given Brussels a collective nervous breakdown over imminent winter shortages? Oh well, what’s a leader to do when he’s just a helpless, innocent little cog in a grand G7 multilateral machine? It’s not like Macron is directly engineering this self-inflicted disaster in any sense, right?

Oh, hang on. He’s not done digging yet.

“In any case, France will make this effort regarding its own reserves, which also reflects a desire to send a clear signal to the market,” Macron added. Yeah, the signals are about as subtle as a flare gun to the face.

Visionary European leaders like Macron have long since handed the wheel to Washington because they apparently thought that it was a better look in the eyes of their Ukrainian girlfriend, Zelensky, than dealing with Russia and its cheap gas.

And now we get yet another Macronian capitulation to a more recent bogeymen that he’s been whining about on the global stage: Trump.

All this drama peaked amid a state visit to Madrid, where Macron dropped by a local university to jam out some avant-garde thoughts on Europe alongside prominent Spanish cultural figures. A local writer teed up a softball right across the center of the plate, invoking Trump and the global rise of populism in the same breath as fascism to frame them as an existential threat to democracy. Which, of course, was the ultimate cue for Macron to explain whose fault this mess actually is. And the short answer is: absolutely, unequivocally not his.

“The great blow for France was the 2008–2012 crisis. And who paid the bill? The middle classes. Even in countries that were less affected, some categories have still not fully recovered in terms of purchasing power and living standards they had before that crisis. And this has been a betrayal,” he said.

The same guy who’s been running the joint for nearly a full decade has to time-travel back 15 to 20 years to find someone responsible for the fact that French middle class is currently on economic life support. Because obviously, he couldn’t possibly have had anything to do with it despite holding the royal scepter for the past ten years.

He chalks up current reality to the 2010 European debt crisis as though he were just an innocent tourist snapping selfies outside the Elysee Palace rather than the captain of the ship.

“A key factor in European competitiveness was very cheap gas coming from Russia. That ended in 2022,” Macron pontificated. “But our great export market was China. That is over too. Europe now has a trade deficit with China. Today, every day, we lose €1 billion in trade with China.”

You’ve got to admire the poetry – if not the gall – of the passive tense there. It ended in 2022. Like a rainstorm! It just happened to end. Totally out of his hands. What can a mere mortal do? Same with selling things to China. Poof, it’s over now! Who knows why? A total mystery. Bleeding a billion euros a day while standing there and shrugging.

Never mind his other brilliant policy hits, like trying to flatline French nuclear power before panicking and awkwardly resurrecting it as the next greatest thing in green renewables, or selling off French industrial crown jewels to Americans only to proudly buy them back later at a massive taxpayer loss. Or riffing to the press on his private jet about how Europe shouldn’t be an American vassal – right before making French citizens and industry pay through the nose for the privilege of heating or cooling their homes as a result of doing precisely that.

It’s the exact same laissez-faire energy that he’s currently bringing to France’s annual far-left protest-and-smashfest season. This fall, the usual professional malcontents have managed to rope some high schoolers into doing their dirty work, meaning that we get to endure teenagers setting fire to their own academic institutions because they believe that their school days are too grueling – in a country where they enjoy a mandatory two-week vacation every six weeks of the academic calendar.

And the government’s cutting-edge counterinsurgency strategy to clear the streets is... online classes. Because the cure for revolutionary zeal is apparently to invite the sons and daughters of Che to hang out near the family fridge and the TV remote while mom and dad are out breaking their backs at work. Perhaps they figure that it’s more inviting than hanging out in the streets and chewing the scenery.

Every single year, the same script plays out, and the authorities just hunker down and wait it out. That appears to be Macron’s playbook for everything, even as he enjoys his 18% approval rating. Just wait for the fire to burn out, and then casually chalk it up to something entirely out of your control. He can’t even bother to unroll the hose at this point.

Looks like maybe the French will just have to wait out Macron himself, and for his term to end, before having a shot at anyone actually doing something useful to reverse course on any of this.