This event was moderated in French
Emmanuel Macron’s Sorbonne address wasn’t just a speech. It was a blueprint. A bet that Europe could only matter in the 21st century if it chose strategic autonomy, deeper integration, and its own voice on defence, industry, and the green transition.
That bet was placed before COVID, before Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, before the energy crisis, and before the far-right became the dominant force in French domestic politics. So the real question, the one this debate was designed to answer, isn’t what Macron said at the Sorbonne. It’s whether the world that followed gave him the chance to build it.
Joined by three voices from the centre of that political project, this discussion traced the arc of French European policy from 2017 to the present: what was achieved, what was tested, and what remains unfinished.
Key Topics:
- The headline commitments of the Sorbonne speech and how they mapped onto EU political reality
- The French Presidency of the Council of the EU: genuine legacy or a window of opportunity only partially used?
- How successive crises reshaped Macron’s European agenda: the pandemic, the war in Ukraine, energy shocks, and electoral upheaval
- The relationship between French domestic politics and European ambition: when do they align, and when do they collide?
- What the next phase of French engagement in the EU looks like, and what activists and allies can actually do to support it
Speakers:
- Valérie Hayer, MEP and President of the Renaissance européenne association;
- Eric Pestel, Secretary-General of Renaissance européenne Paris and co-author of Vive l’Europe, a study on Macron’s European policy
- Jeanette Süß, European Affairs Manager at the Friedrich Naumann Foundation and co-author of Vive l’Europe