Macron urges EU to convert economic weight into strategic power

Emmanuel Macron has mounted a broad-ranging plea for Europe to match its economic heft with unified strategic instruments. Central to his pitch is fiscal integration at scale: pooled borrowing to underwrite continental programmes in defence, decarbonisation and artificial intelligence, with an indicative investment target around €1.2 trillion per year. He argues common issuance would both mobilise capital rapidly and offer investors an alternative to dollar-dominated assets. Macron framed the need for shared instruments as rooted in changing geopolitics, where traditional security guarantees and open-market assumptions are under pressure. Beyond joint debt, he is pressing peers to make the euro’s recent appreciation a formal summit agenda item, saying a firmer currency has material effects on exporters, import prices and regional activity and thus should be treated as a macroeconomic and strategic question. He tied those monetary concerns to regulatory strategy, warning that looming disputes with the United States over digital-platform rules could escalate into trade reprisals and that Europe must be able to defend its standards without being economically disadvantaged. Together, these interventions signal that Paris views fiscal, exchange-rate and regulatory levers as interconnected tools for strategic autonomy rather than isolated policy domains. The proposals revive familiar north–south tensions over mutualised debt and test treaty limits on EU borrowing, while also raising questions about how markets would price pooled credit risk. Implementation would require new governance mechanisms to allocate funds, enforce accountability and protect fiscally conservative members from asymmetric liabilities. Short-term outcomes at the upcoming summit could range from rhetorical support and technical mandates for the Commission to concrete steps toward common issuance; long-term effects would reshape EU fiscal architecture, capital-market dynamics and the bloc’s bargaining posture with external powers. The success of Macron’s approach depends on political consensus, legal workarounds or treaty changes, and convincing investors that pooled instruments have credible safeguards.