Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s rapid visit to France on the last leg of his 4-nation tour of Europe brought the two leaders together for the first time since Macron shook the political landscape in France to claim the throne.
Less than three weeks after the inauguration of a new President and less than a week before he faces his first Parliamentary election to cobble together a governing majority for his term is hardly an appropriate time for a visit by the leader of a country that is an important strategic and business partner.
This was the scenario facing French President Emmanuel Macron as he prepared to receive Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi in Paris for the first ever meeting between the two leaders. Both of them have redefined politics in their respective countries and caused a major upheaval amongst their opponents.
There are a lot of differences between Modi and Macron and yet their impact on the political landscape in their respective countries has been tremendous. Modi is a career politician, hailing from the conservative, almost extreme right-wing of the Indian political spectrum.
The Modi government has also taken a hard stance on issues like migration, and curbed activities of several global NGOs including the Greenpeace and Amnesty International.
Macron, on the other hand, is a trained investment banker, who had a short run as a minister in the government of the previous President Francois Hollande and who was seen as a completely new element in the recent presidential elections.
Despite the differences in their views, the two leaders do share a common thread.
While Modi has been the mascot of the ruling BJP and has helped the party gain state after state in India, Macron, fresh from his victory in the presidential elections, has managed to build his party from a scratch in less than a year to become the leading political force in the country, decimating both the Socialists and the Republicans – the two principal parties that had dominated the French political landscape since the end of the World War II.
As Macron prepares for the parliamentary elections later this week, his party, Republic En Marche!, is leading the opinion polls, with a strong, almost unassailable lead over the Republicans and the socialists. His party is expected to get a crushing majority, winning nearly 425 seats in the 577-member Assemblée Nationale, the lower house of the French Parliament.
His political party, La Republique En Marche (The Republic on the Move) did not even exist till a few weeks ago!
It was in this setting that Modi met Macron. When the French president welcomed Modi in his official residence, the Palais Elysee, he held Modi’s hand in a tight grip, looking Modi straight in the eye, while keeping his other hand on Modi’s shoulder, almost like he was trying to keep Modi at bay and to prevent him from resorting to one of his favourite greeting modes – the hug.
One could see similarities in the way Macron approached Modi with the way he had greeted the US President Donald Trump just a few days earlier at the G7 Summit in Germany, where Macron refused to let go of Trump’s hand and kept looking him straight in the eye.
Though Modi’s visit was less than 24 hours long, and his luncheon meeting with Macron less than two hours long, the two leaders had a large variety of issues on the table; some long-anticipated and long-pending and some others dragged on the table by developments that happened while Modi was on his European sejour.
The sudden, though not entirely unexpected, decision by the United States President Donald Trump, announcing the withdrawal of the US from the COP21 agreement on climate change gave a lot of substance to the Macron-Modi meet as both France and India, together with China and the United States, had been at the forefront of an effort to clinch a deal at the Climate Change Summit in Paris in December 2015.
A personal chemistry between Modi, the then US President Barack Obama, and Macron’s predecessor in the Palais Elysees, Francois Hollande, with active support from Chinese President Xi Jinping, had made the deal possible.
Through ISA, France and India had committed to promote over 1 terawatts of solar power generation, bringing electricity to hundreds of millions of families across some of the poorest nations in the world.
After his luncheon meeting with Modi in Paris on Saturday, Macron said:
“The first part of our discussion was entirely focused on fighting climate change and the fact that both our nations have a lot to do, together, in protecting the global climate,” Macron added.
For his part, Modi said:
Drawing a parallel between terrorism and climate change, Modi added that while every child in France had seen and felt the horrible nature of terrorism – one of the biggest challenges facing the world today – the other big threat, climate change and pollution, is mainly invisible, but one whose impact is being felt all over the world, just like terror’s.
Asserting that green, renewable energy could be the new horizon for developing Indo-French business and trade ties, Modi also welcomed more French investments in this area.
Macron also spoke of the importance of increasing the number of Indian students in French universities and boosting tourist arrivals from India, two rapidly growing sectors of the Indian economy, and where France is still performing way behind its potential.
Of course, the French are keen to gain a much larger share in the Indian defence and infrastructure projects, again two areas where French companies are well positioned but can do much better.
Thus, when Macron arrives in New Delhi later this year, expect him to come prepared with a big list of French champions that he would help gain significant market share in India.
(Ranvir Nayar is Managing Director and Founder of a global media house specialised in Europe-Asia business. He can be reached on Twitter @ranvirnayar.)
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