The Paris stock market rose slightly at the open Monday after the expected French presidential election win for Emmanuel Macron. Macron won a resounding victory in the French presidential election but the focus will shift immediately Monday to whether he can govern the country without the support of a traditional party. / AFP PHOTO / CHRIS J RATCLIFFE
by Dario THUBURN
Agence France-Presse
LONDON, United Kingdom – British eurosceptics reacted angrily on Monday to Emmanuel Macron’s victory in France saying the election of a pro-EU president was bad news for the Brexit negotiations but experts said a stronger Europe could ease the talks.
Brexit figurehead Nigel Farage said Macron would be European Commission president Jean-Claude Juncker’s “puppet” while the Leave.EU campaign group compared his election win on Sunday to France’s surrender to Nazi Germany.
“France’s new hope puts cloud over Brexit,” read a front-page headline in The Daily Telegraph newspaper.
The broadsheet said Macron could be expected to “continue with France’s already tough stance on Brexit”.
Brexit a ‘crime’
Macron, a pro-European centrist, has been highly critical of the Brexit vote during his election campaign.
In a press conference in Albi in southern France on Thursday he said: “What the UK is experiencing is that Brexit is not a walk in the park”.
He defined the referendum outcome a “crime” in an interview for Monocle magazine in March in which he said the country was making a “serious mistake”.
But analysts said that while Macron is likely to be tough on Britain’s divorce settlement, a victory for rival Marine Le Pen would have been a worse outcome as it would have meant negotiating with a European Union in disarray.
His election “may make it easier for the EU to come to a sensible conclusion” on Britain leaving, Jonathan Portes, a professor of economics and public policy at King’s College London university, told AFP.
Macron’s victory is “good news for Europe as a whole, including the UK,” he said, adding however that Macron was likely to “take a relatively hard line” on Britain participating in Europe’s single market.
Macron has previously argued that Britain should continue paying into the EU budget if it wants access to the EU’s markets — a red line in Britain, where the Brexit campaign was partially fought on stopping payments.
Joseph Downing, a researcher at France’s National Centre for Scientific Research, said Macron was likely to prove “pragmatic” in practice.
“He’s a shrewd politician and he realises that the UK is the third largest export market for France.”
“So he obviously wants a deal,” he said.
Crispin Blunt, head of the British parliament’s foreign affairs scrutiny committee, also said that for Britain Macron was a better choice than Le Pen.
“We don’t want to be negotiating with an EU in existential crisis — which it could be if Le Pen had won,” the Conservative MP told The Daily Telegraph.
Prime Minister Theresa May’s Downing Street office issued a brief statement saying she had congratulated Macron and discussed Brexit with him but gave no further details.
In a rare honour for a presidential candidate, May received Macron in London in February, where he promised “a fair execution of Brexit, protecting French and European interests”.
As he was walking out of Downing Street he also said he would seek to lure back French expatriates living in London.
He told a rally the same day: “The best trade deal for Britain… is membership of the EU.”
‘Tough’ on Brexit
Relations between May and EU leaders have become increasingly rancorous in the run-up to Britain’s June 8 general election, with the prime minister accusing Brussels of making “threats” against the country over the highly complex divorce proceedings.
Macron’s chief economic advisor Jean Pisani-Ferry told BBC radio that the new French leader would be “tough” with Britain but would not set out to punish it and would seek to avoid a “hard Brexit”.
“There will be a tough negotiation and he will be tough,” he said. When asked if France could seek to “punish” Britain for voting to leave the EU, he answered: “Punish? Certainly not.”
But Britain’s Leave.EU group was scathing.
A tweet on its official account next to an image of the Eiffel Tower read simply: “RIP France”.
Another referred to France’s surrender to German forces during World War II.
“The French rolled over in 1940. This time they’ve saved Germany the fuel and bullets,” it said.