Eye of the Storm

It’s a bright early-September day inside France’s presidential Élysée Palace, and President Emmanuel Macron is reflecting on the grueling 12 months just past, with the so-called Yellow Vests (gilets jaunes) protesters raging across the country, many aiming their fury at him.

That was surely enough to rattle any leader. Yet Macron, leaning forward on his leather couch, offers another view. “In a certain way, the gilets jaunes were very good for me,” he says, as the afternoon shadows lengthened on the lawn outside. “Because it reminded me who I should be.”

The question of who Emmanuel Macron should be has occupied the French, and many around the world, in the three years since the then Economy Minister launched a grassroots uprising of his own. That movement would deliver him the presidency in May 2017 and smash a political order that had lasted for half a century. Macron first and foremost saw himself as a reformer, throwing himself into dismantling rules that he believed had long strangled France’s economic prospects. He and his La République En Marche party (LREM) scrapped a wealth tax levied on France’s richest residents, trimmed the country’s labyrinthine labor regulations and made it less costly for companies to hire and fire staff.

But Macron also saw himself as a global leader. In the two years since his victory, the President, just 41, has inserted himself into every international crisis, striding into the vacuum left by the weakened German Chancellor Angela Merkel, the Brexit-distracted U.K. and a U.S. President in retreat from the role of leader of the West. In a fractious European Union, Macron has quietly worked to shape the agenda on pivotal issues like the environment, defense,