Macron convenes French party leaders as soaring energy prices put focus on wars in Iran and Ukraine

Haxie Meyers-Belkin is pleased to welcome Renaud Foucart, Senior Lecturer in Economics at Lancaster University’s Management School in the UK. According to Foucart, France’s energy-price crisis exposes a deeper collision between economic constraints, political accountability and an approaching presidential election. In a large EU country where many households and businesses outside densely populated urban areas remain dependent on cars, sharply higher fuel prices can pose an immediate threat to livelihoods. Foucart interprets French President Emmanuel Macron’s rare Élysée meeting with party leaders over soaring energy prices as both an exercise in presidential legacy-building and an attempt to force prospective successors to confront constraints they might otherwise prefer to evade: high energy costs, rising borrowing costs, limited fiscal room and, above all, the politically difficult question of pension expenditure.