PARIS: President Emmanuel Macron on Sunday sought to showcase European military cooperation in France’s annual Bastille Day parade at a time of growing tensions between Europe and the United States.
Key EU leaders, including German Chancellor Angela Merkel and Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte, joined Macron in Paris to watch the parade down the Champs-Elysees that commemorates the July 14, 1789, storming of the Bastille fortress in Paris during the French Revolution.
Some 4,300 members of the armed forces, including regiments from other European armies, marched down the avenue’s famed cobblestones in a tradition that dates back to the aftermath of World War I.
Army dogs festooned with medals, members of France’s celebrated Foreign Legion and mounted cavalry in glittering uniforms brandishing ceremonial sabres all paraded in front of the high-ranking guests.
Meanwhile, French inventor and entrepreneur Franky Zapata showed off his futuristic flyboard, soaring above the Champs Elysees and the assembled leaders.
“The army is transforming: it is modernising for our soldiers, our sovereignty and our independence,” Macron told France 2 television in brief remarks.
Closer European defence cooperation has been one of Macron’s key foreign policy aims and the president shows no sign of wavering despite growing political turbulence in Germany and Britain’s looming exit from the European Union.
At the 2017 parade, Macron’s guest of honour was the newly inaugurated President Donald Trump as the young French leader sought to take the initiative in forming a bond with his US counterpart.
But since then ties between Trump and Macron have soured over the US pullout from the Paris climate accord and the Iran nuclear deal, as well as France’s new law for a tax on digital giants, mostly US companies.
“President Trump has been an excellent ambassador for a Europe of defence,” Armed Forces Minister Florence Parly told the Parisien newspaper on Sunday, pointing to “questions, even thinly veiled threats he made towards Europe or on the durability of American commitment”.
Macron, who pushed the idea of the European Intervention Initiative (EI2) to undertake missions outside of existing structures like NATO, insisted on the importance of European defence cooperation.
“Never, since the end of World War II has Europe been so important,” Macron, who after coming to power in 2017 controversially dispensed with the president’s traditional July 14 television interview, said in a written statement. Merkel told reporters after the event that the parade was a “great gesture for a European defence policy” and Germany was “honoured” to have taken part. — AFP
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