FRENCH President Emmanuel Macron welcomed Chinese President Xi Jinping to the Pyrenees mountains on Tuesday (May 7) on the second day of a trip during which Xi showed little sign of being ready to offer major concessions on trade or foreign policy.
Macron and his wife, Brigitte, who greeted Xi and his wife, Peng Liyuan, at the Tarbes-Lourdes Pyrenees airport in windy, cold weather, took them to have lunch in the mountains dear to Macron as the birthplace of his maternal grandmother.
Macron, Xi and their wives, accompanied by translators, will eat lamb, cheese and blueberry pie in a traditional restaurant high up in the mountains, about an hour’s drive from the airport. The two couples were taking separate cars.
Advisers to the French president described the Pyrenees trip as breaking with protocol for a chance for one-on-one direct chats with Xi, without scores of aides on either side.
One of Macron’s main objectives is to convince Xi to reduce the trade imbalance between the two regions, with better access for European firms in China and fewer subsidies for Chinese exporters.
Macron has a history of trying to establish outside-of-protocol personal relationships with his counterparts, even those he strongly disagrees with, in often not very successful bids to obtain more from them.
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The French leader is keen to embrace, hug, wink at or slap his counterparts on the back – which he did not chance with Xi, who is not a hugger.
Macron did do so at the time with then U.S President Donald Trump and with Russian President Vladimir Putin before the Ukraine war, and more recently with Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, much to the pleasure of social media commentators.
Xi’s Pyrenees invite has echoes of Trump joining Macron in 2017 to watch the Bastille Day parade, or Putin’s 2019 trip to the French president’s Bregancon fortress summer retreat, in southeast France.
“Emmanuel Macron attempted this narcissistic diplomacy of ‘I flatter the tyrant’ with Vladimir Putin for five years, with the Bregancon fort … the camaraderie,” Raphael Glucksmann, who leads the French Socialists’ European parliament ticket, told RTL radio.
“And all that ended with what, the invasion of Ukraine and the threats to our democracies,” Glucksmann said.
The European Union’s 27 members ran a trade deficit of 396 billion euros (US$426.25 billion) with China in 2022, according to European Commission data, compared with a 250.3 billion deficit a year earlier.
French and Chinese companies concluded some agreements on Monday ranging from energy, finance and transport on the sidelines of Xi’s visit, but most were agreements to cooperate or renewed commitments to work together, and there were no significant deals.
European hopes of an Airbus plane order to coincide with Xi’s visit appear to have been disappointed, with the two sides agreeing only to expand co-operation.
Industry sources say the two sides have been in negotiations on a new plane order for months.
China has historically signalled large jet orders timed to coincide with state visits, but the negotiations between Airbus and China’s CASC buying agency are likely to go down to the wire and are not guaranteed to result in a deal, sources said.
However, French cognac makers rallied on Tuesday as Xi presented what Macron described as an “open attitude” towards a trade dispute between the two countries.
A French diplomatic source said China would not impose taxes or customs duties on French cognac, pending the investigation. Xi did not comment on this during his many public statements on Monday. REUTERS
