French Presidential Poof de Crème Now Snubbing Polish President at Joint Summit

Emmanuel Macron really has an opinion of himself, non?

My initial truly bad impression of the little Gallic snoot goes all the way back to when Giorgia Meloni was first elected prime minister of Italy. She wasn’t, you know, a regular, or quite in the same social clubs that the Brussels Brahmins and the fellow who holds banquets in Louis XIV’s palaces frequented. Macron’s Gallic snobbery asserted itself, and when he held an intimate little get-together for the heads of the larger countries, Meloni’s invite, which had always been assured for the urbane male Italian prime ministers preceding her, somehow never arrived.

She just didn’t fit in with that group, working-class union stench and all on her.

Two years later, an ascendant Meloni hosted a memorable G-7 as Europe – and our own president – was slipping towards a self-created abyss of inertia and impotence.

This week’s gathering of G7 leaders in Italy looks more like the last supper than a display of Western power…

— Alan Watson (@DietHeartNews) June 14, 2024

The interim two years have seen Macron desperately trying to hold on to both power and French prestige, but his machinations haven’t gone according to plan.

All the plotting and skullduggery against his political rival, Marine Le Pen, while quite possibly removing her physically as a candidate, has only served to increase her party’s popularity across the breadth and scope of the French countryside, even as French urban areas become more and more foreign.

Le Pen’s National Rally (RN) swept the local elections a month ago, and even those members of Macron’s renamed Renaissance Party who still remain have shifted to the right in an attempt to fend off RN and appeal to voters.

Some of Emmanuel Macron’s high-profile allies lost in the local elections, but Edouard Philippe’s party, an offshoot of the presidential camp, strengthened its base. Meanwhile, to score victories, Macron’s centrist party had to lean further to the right.

Smiling broadly, Edouard Philippe did not wait until 8 pm on Sunday, March 22, to celebrate his victory in the municipal elections and to greet his supporters gathered in the heart of Le Havre’s City Hall. The mayor of the Normand port city since 2010 was reelected with 47.71% of the vote in a three-way race against the Communist candidate Jean-Lecoq (41.17%) and Franck Keller (11.12%), backed by two far-right parties, the Union des Droites pour la République (UDR) and Rassemblement National (RN).

Before celebrating his win away from the cameras, Philippe, a former prime minister of President Emmanuel Macron, addressed the people of Le Havre briefly. He referenced his national ambitions only with a wink, saying there are “reasons to hope when all those of goodwill come together in a discourse of truth and set aside the extremes and their easy answers.”

There is hope that centrists and French ‘conservatives’ will earn enough votes to work together to block whatever gains RN makes in order to keep them from governing.

You have to love the Parliamentary system.

While all the traditional parties are spinning themselves as suitable substitutes for voting for RN, the leaders of that party, Le Pen and Jordan Bardella, are pounding the pavement. The team has been reaching out to the French business community, letting them know they hear them and plan to change things.

Far-right leaders Marine Le Pen and Jordan Bardella pledged on Monday to “liberate” the French economy by slashing red tape and bureaucracy.

“Regulations, often accumulated without real assessment of their impact, represent a staggering cost for economic actors … [and] decrease the purchasing power of French citizens,” they wrote in a joint letter to business leaders published on X. 

According to the text, Le Pen and Bardella are tasking a group of National Rally officials to meet with business lobbies and organizations ahead of next year’s presidential election. Their goal will be drawing up a list of “harmful” regulations to be slashed if the far right comes to power. The group will be scrutinizing both EU and French rules.

“Our objective is to develop a wide-ranging draft simplification decree, which will be published at the start of our term, to liberate the French economy and help boost production,” they said.

Leading the polls ahead of the 2027 deadline, National Rally has been seeking to woo the business community. Bardella is meeting top officials from France’s main business lobby MEDEF on Monday, and Le Pen met the country’s richest man Bernard Arnault and other major CEOs at a dinner in Paris earlier this month.

The lame duck, deeply unpopular Macron, with his approval ratings hovering in the teens (11% in late 2025)…

…has seemed to want to pivot and spend the time burnishing his international reputation since he holds as little influence as a fallen soufflé in French politics.

So he’s made himself even more prominent a fixture on the European stage, and, by extension, in the global press, thanks to the Iranian conflict giving him a point to flex his harping smack talk about Donald Trump from a safe distance.

I’m not quite sure if he’s doing this in concert with European Commission President Ursula Von der Leyen or to impress her with his energy pursuing it. He is going to need a job shortly, and it seems all fallen European leaders look to the EU, the UN, or Davos for their next gig if they’ve no hope of ever seeing elected office again. I do think this calculation is playing some part of a role in the teeny man’s anti-Trump bravado.

In any event, Macron has been a little whirlybird of frenzied meetings, zoom calls, and jetting about the continent, orchestrating plans for world domination – or at least the Strait of Hormuz whenever it’s safe for them – while villifying the Americans.

After holding a flashy get-together with the United Kingdom’s Keir Starmer and a cautious-looking Giorgia Meloni (who is under tremendous pressure from leftists at home), in which Macron declared they would take over administration of the Strait of Hormuz from the United States…

No one does virtual leadership like Macron & Starmer https://t.co/Rc0wND5PMG

— Gray Connolly (@GrayConnolly) April 18, 2026

…he’s organizing his own little summits with his weak minded friend that conveniently leave the real power players – and possible naysayers – out. 

FT: Macron didn’t invite Rutte and von der Leyen to the Strait of Hormuz summit.

At the same time, he invited representatives of more than 40 countries. The summit is planned to be held this week.

FT sources said Starmer insisted on von der Leyen and Rutte presence, but Macron… pic.twitter.com/XkC265T02M

— Chay Bowes (@BowesChay) April 17, 2026

FT sources said Starmer insisted on von der Leyen and Rutte presence, but Macron rejected twice.

Macron is also doing his duty, upholding French snobbery and EU principles as he jets about Europe.

Donald Tusk, Prime Minister of Poland, is the EU’s chosen man in that country. The Brussels Brahmins were pretty well put out this past August when their designated candidate got his electoral butt handed to him by a populist party, former boxer named Karol Nawrocki.

The EU and the new president, whose vetoes of Tusk’s legislation cannot be overridden because of Tusk’s now tiny majority, clashed within months when the Digital Services Act was passed by the Polish Parliament.

Nawrocki ixnayed it.

Poland’s President Karol Nawrocki vetoes the implementation of the EU’s Digital Services Act which aims to censor Europeans online:

“A situation in which a government official decides what is permitted on the Internet is reminiscent of the Ministry of Truth in Orwell’s 1984.” pic.twitter.com/jWFdnORK1T

— Daily Romania (@daily_romania) January 12, 2026

Nawrocki also recently refused to tether the country more firmly to the EU by turning down the chance to borrow more money from them on their terms. If we need something, the Polish president said, we’ll figure out how to buy it.

Heads exploded.

Polish President Karol Nawrocki refused Tuesday to sign a law enabling Poland to access almost $51 billion in preferential defense loans facilitated by the European Union, claiming it would be wrong to make Poland more dependent on Brussels.

Instead, the president proposed an alternative draft law suggesting national resources that could be used instead of European loans to pay for further investments in defense.

Which may well be why, when the little French president showed up for a visit today – all about defense, etc – he felt perfectly entitled to diss the Polish president completely and just chatted up Donald Tusk.

 Isn’t this little preening peacock something? Macron’s ministers are all coming with him, too. But ‘bypassing’ the Polish president.

French President Emmanuel Macron arrived in Gdansk on Monday for a one-day visit to Poland but will only meet with Prime Minister Donald Tusk, snubbing President Karol Nawrocki and exposing the increasingly bitter rivalry between Poland’s two centers of power, according to Polsat News. The presidential palace said Nawrocki’s aides had sought a meeting with Macron, but Tusk’s office pushed for the visit to take place in Gdansk rather than Warsaw, effectively making a meeting impossible.

Tensions over foreign representation

Presidential spokesman Grzegorz Urbanek stated: “Prime Minister Tusk was very keen on preventing a meeting between the two presidents. That is why he insisted the visit take place in Gdansk, not Warsaw.” The decision is politically sensitive because the Polish president traditionally represents the country alongside the government in foreign affairs, particularly on defense issues. Urbanek added: “The issues are serious. There is the nuclear question. An official visit by the French president without meeting our president raises doubts.”

Nuclear talks and Budapest visit

The Gdansk summit marks the first Polish-French intergovernmental meeting, focused on French proposals for a European nuclear deterrent, military cooperation, and possible French involvement in Poland’s second nuclear power plant. The snub comes days after Nawrocki visited Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban in Budapest — a trip sharply criticized by Tusk’s government due to Orban’s close ties to Moscow. Commentators suggest the Budapest visit may have cooled French enthusiasm for meeting Nawrocki, deepening what Polish media call a “war for the seat” at international meetings.

 

Unbelievable gall. Or, GALLIC.

European democracy in action again.

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