On paper, Emmanuel Macron is an antonym to Donald Trump. Yesterday's French presidential elections will have ramifications on both transatlantic relations and the Middle East. The two novice leaders, who never held elected office, have a choice to either mend fences, confront or manage their deeply rooted ideological and political differences.
After all, Macron officially declared his candidacy just one week after Trump's election victory. That monumental shift in the United States, as well as the fallout from Brexit, became a wake-up call in French politics, causing people to start scrambling around the country to find an acceptable candidate to beat the far-right contender, Marine Le Pen. In that sense, Macron's ascendance to power was meant to be the French rebuttal to the wave of populism and anti-globalisation in London and Washington. Yet, it's not the first time that politics in both countries were so intimately intertwined and overtly polarised.
US-French relations hit a low between 2003 and 2008 following Jacques Chirac's defiance of George W Bush's invasion of Iraq. Nicolas Sarkozy's honeymoon with Barack Obama was short-lived and the US in the past eight years favoured Germany as the main European interlocutor. Trump will now have a working relationship with a French leader who sought the endorsement of his nemesis, Barack Obama. The US president will need to make overtures after tarnishing the French pride during his campaign by asserting "Paris is no longer Paris".

Trump versus Macron

What they have in common though is a similar business background, and both are non-traditional and non-ideological leaders who claim to lead a movement. An independent centrist, Macron leans to the left on social issues and veers to the right on the economy. He believes in a "protective Europe", which would strengthen Germany's hand in trade negotiations with the US. The challenge is whether key differences on trade and climate change will cloud their cooperation on foreign policy and the Middle East.
While Trump's source of inspiration is mostly Richard Nixon, Macron operates on a platform inspired by Charles De Gaulle, Francois Mitterrand, and Jacques Chirac. Hence, he might have no hesitation in diplomatically challenging US influence when it serves French national interests. He might even entertain the idea of playing up differences with Trump for domestic reasons.
Macron wants France to be an "independent, humanist, European power", whereas Trump has an "America first" slogan strengthened by a hard power approach. However, both leaders are generally cautious in getting entangled in wars. Since Brexit became a reality, France has become the only European Union member holding a veto power in the United Nations Security Council, which will give Paris a unique opportunity to assert itself and might subsequently lead to occasional disagreement with Washington. Macron believes that European major powers should fill the vacuum of the US' gradual retreat from the world, hence will be keen to raise doubts about the US-Russian coordination and even challenge it when needed.