“We have entered a world of great migrations and we will have more and more of it [migration]”, former investment banker Emmanuel Macron declared during a debate on climate change.
Speaking at a discussion staged for Science and Future magazine, the independent candidate announced that the world has entered an age of mass migration which will be inescapable for Europe.
“In the coming decades we will have migrations from geopolitical conflicts that will continue to play, and we will have climate migrations because the planet is in a state of deep imbalance,” he said.
France’s failure to tackle climate change will have contributed to these mass migrations, according to Macron, who argued that the country must “reconcile a principle of solidarity [with the ‘refugees’]”.
Voicing a stance diametrically opposite to that of his rival Marine Le Pen, who wants to close France’s borders, Macron said the country’s geographical location makes resisting the migrant tide impossible.
“France will not be able to stem it, and Europe will be affected immediately. We will see a migratory phenomenon far greater than what we have seen [with migrants from] Syria.”
On Wednesday the sociologist and writer Mathieu Bock-Côté warned that Macron, who stands a good chance of winning the presidential election later this year, embodies “all that France wants to extricate itself from”.
“Excessive globalism and cultural leftism are in contradiction with the aspirations that seem to come from the depths of the country,” he wrote in Le Figaro.
It was revealed on Wikileaks that Macron, who is often described as having appeared in the presidential race “from nowhere”, was working on an alliance with Hillary Clinton last year.
The globalist candidate had requested the Democratic presidential candidate’s presence at a private roundtable dinner in October with several European politicians including Labour MP Chuka Umunna, according to an email published on Wikileaks.
At this, a discussion “to evaluate how progressives develop a successful political and economic narrative to counter the right and populists to the left” was due to take place.
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