Keir Starmer and Emmanuel Macron: New allies heading in different directions

BLENHEIM PALACE, Oxfordshire — One is a rising star. The other’s star is falling. But Keir Starmer and Emmanuel Macron reckon a lot can be achieved during their time left together. 

The new U.K. prime minister impressed the French president as he hosted the European Political Community summit in the historic Blenheim Palace in rural England this week.

The grouping was the brainchild of Macron, who oversaw its first meeting in Prague in 2022. He designed the gathering as an informal platform to discuss shared concerns without the need for black and white deals or statements at the end: a kind of talking shop on steroids.

It was a stroke of luck for Starmer that England had been chosen to host the latest EPC summit just two weeks after he won an election landslide. 

Earlier this month, the Labour leader scored an emphatic victory over the right-of-center Conservatives, taking his party back into government for the first time in almost a decade and a half. 

Macron, on the other hand, is on a markedly different trajectory. After more than seven years in power he took a gamble on snap parliamentary elections last month and was squeezed from the far left and the hard right. His grouping managed to cobble together a surprise deal to maintain influence on the next government — but was forced to compromise with right-wingers in the process.

The election was a risky throw of the dice designed to see off the growing threat from far-right leader Marine Le Pen, but spectacularly backfired, seeming to leave him a lame duck president at 47 years old.

And while Starmer’s center-left Labour Party is now dominant in the U.K. House of Commons, Macron’s plummeting personal approval ratings point to a fight for his political life if he stands again in the 2027 presidential elections.

But while they may seem to have little in common in terms of their career pathways, the two centrists have struck up good relations fast and look set to make the most of what could be a short window of time on the world stage together.

Breach of protocol

In a potential breach of diplomatic protocol, Macron was the first world leader to phone Starmer and congratulate him as the U.K. election results became clear — before he had officially been appointed prime minister. The pair spoke again the following day once the British leader had entered Downing Street. 

Their first bilateral after the election was at the NATO summit in Washington the following week, during which Macron shared a photo of the pair in a warm embrace. And on the night after the Blenheim Palace summit, birthplace of Winston Churchill, the pair spoke one-on-one again before sitting down to a posh dinner together in the opulent surroundings. 

Keir Starmer and Emmanuel Macron reckon a lot can be achieved during their time left together. | Ludovic Marin/Getty Images

The chemistry between the two appeared warm on a stroll through the ornate water terraces of Blenheim, out of earshot of the cameras. Both were smiling, as Macron made occasional hand gestures to punctuate his points. For a few minutes the pair sat on a stone bench, chatting privately.

At a press conference in the late afternoon, Macron told POLITICO his new counterpart had ushered in a “new momentum for your political lives and domestic politics.” The sentiment echoed the insurgent political movement Macron formed in 2022: “En Marche,” now renamed “Renaissance.”

According to U.K. officials at Blenheim, the summit’s spotlight was shared between Starmer and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy. That may have left Macron pondering whether he could be handing over the centrist powerbroker baton in Europe. 

“Macron must look at Starmer and wonder what might have been,” said Anand Menon, director of the UK in a Changing Europe think tank. “From nowhere, the Brits — long viewed by Europe’s elite as a basket case — have emerged as putative leaders of the continent’s centrist tendencies.”

At his own press conference, Starmer said he sensed a “real appetite” for a reset in relations between the U.K. and Europe following the turbulent Brexit years, when the Conservatives were in government.

“We can only make progress on the issues that so many people care about, like illegal migration and national security, if we have the maturity and leadership to reach out a hand to our European friends,” the PM said. 

Warm words or concrete action?

The question is whether the warm words will lead to real changes on big-ticket issues such as illegal migration across the English Channel and continued barriers to trade between Britain and the continent. 

The summit’s spotlight was shared between Starmer and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy. | Pool Photo by Kin Cheung via Getty Images

On the first, both Starmer and Macron suggested small steps could lead to a wider migrant returns agreement between the U.K. and EU in future. 

And it was notable that a number of migrants intercepted in the Channel the night before the summit were returned to France for the first time ever — although the U.K. side insisted it had been an operational decision for security services on the ground, rather than a change in government policy. 

Nevertheless, the indications are that the mood music is better between the two nations than in recent years. Just a few weeks ago, during the election campaign, the Conservative government in Britain was hinting it could rip up the European Convention on Human Rights in the hope of force-starting a controversial deportation scheme to Rwanda. 

In contrast, Starmer brought a copy of the 1949 Treaty of London to the Blenheim summit — the founding document of the Council of Europe. A government aide said the move illustrated a commitment to the rule of international law.

Starmer also announced a multimillion pound diversion of aid for poorer nations aimed at improving opportunities and reducing the pull factor for migrants towards Europe. It seemed a direct response to Macron, who has long argued the issue must be challenged closer to the source. The French president made the point again as he arrived at the Blenheim summit. 

A U.K. Foreign Office official said Macron had been pleased at how the Brits had handled the gathering — describing it as a “big tick” for the new Downing Street regime. 

But the same person, who spoke on condition of anonymity, argued a good relationship between Britain and its close neighbor wasn’t so unusual. “There are all the clichés that we hate each other, but we are close on most things,” the official said.