‘Vega’ meeting. Macron summons everyone to the Élysée Palace

Paris. Faced with the “rapid deterioration” of the geopolitical situation in the Middle East and Ukraine, and a fuel shortage that has “become unsustainable”, the President of the French Republic, Emmanuel Macron, received the leaders of all political parties at the Élysée Palace yesterday morning for a highly confidential meeting attended not only by Prime Minister Sébastien Lecornu but also by senior figures from the military and the domestic intelligence service (DGSI) and the foreign intelligence service (DGSE).

At the end of the meeting, which took place in the new ‘Vega’ crisis room (Macron’s code name), the French president held a press conference in which, with a grave expression, he warned that ‘in recent weeks, the Russian hybrid threat against Europeans and France has intensified’, through acts of sabotage, drones and interference, but that Moscow’s attacks “will not go unanswered” and that Putin would be making a serious “mistake” to continue along these lines. The Kremlin’s intention “is to intimidate us and to undermine our efforts to support the Ukrainians. The result will be the opposite”, he continued, citing the example of the discovery of a drone armed with explosives at Leipzig Airport in August. “We will not be intimidated, because we know that our security, both today and tomorrow, is at stake in Ukraine”, said Macron. Faced with the Russian threat, “no one is safe; we must all be vigilant, take action, and do everything we can to anticipate, plan for and protect ourselves”, he added, announcing that he had asked the government to urgently draw up “a plan to protect the country’s critical infrastructure”, with specific defences against drones and cyber-attacks.

“One thing struck me in particular: the tone and expressions of those present as they emerged from the crisis meeting. They all seemed a little dazed. I believe they were confronted with indisputable facts regarding Russia’s hybrid threats. It is no coincidence that there was no controversy on this point,” François-Xavier Bourmaud, a political journalist at L’Opinion, tells Il Foglio. “On the other hand, there was plenty of criticism of the government’s response to rising fuel prices, which was deemed insufficient,” Bourmaud emphasises. During the press conference, Macron stated that before “spending as much public money as possible” – which would result in increased debt or higher taxes – it is essential to “tackle the root of the problem”. This statement was criticised both by the leader of the sovereigntist right, Jordan Bardella – who argued that the “issue of purchasing power” had “unfortunately been ignored by the government” – and by the frontman of the social-democratic left, Raphaël Glucksmann, who called for “much more substantial aid” to counter rising fuel prices, in the face of a “socially explosive” situation.

The decision to summon the party leaders was taken last Tuesday at the end of a two-and-a-half-hour meeting, held behind closed doors and without mobile phones, in the Salone Verde at the Élysée Palace. The heads of the various intelligence agencies, together with the head of the Direction Générale de l’Énergie et du Climat – the central government body responsible for defining and implementing national energy and climate policy – painted a very bleak picture for Macron of the international crises and their consequences. “It was a very trying experience,” an anonymous adviser to the president told Le Parisien. “He came away convinced that it was his duty to inform the rest of the political class. So that everyone has the same level of information regarding the decisions that will need to be taken in the future,” he added.

Yesterday’s meeting was held in the ‘Saint-Denis’ format, introduced by Macron in August 2023 (the first meeting of this kind took place in the town of Saint-Denis, on the northern outskirts of Paris). It is a method of consultation behind closed doors between the Head of State and party leaders, aimed at finding compromises on complex reforms or, as in this case, sharing sensitive information of a political and national security nature. In the coming weeks, France will convene an extraordinary G7 summit dedicated to energy and the management of reserves, to “avoid unnecessary tensions between G7 countries and our partners”, but also “to assess options regarding the possible mobilisation of strategic reserves”, Macron announced. Yesterday’s meeting, he concluded, was “an exercise in transparency”, to ensure that political forces are well informed: “I will organise it whenever I deem it necessary and relevant to the quality of democratic debate”.