Emmanuel Macron’s victory in the French presidential elections might also be seen as a victory for the EU establishment. Still Brussels has been unusually candid about the limits of this triumph. The French president has stalled, rather than quashed, a cataclysmic reckoning for the European project. Charles Michel, president of the European Council, best captured the sense of exhausted relief: “We can count on France for five more years.”

True, Macron secured a comfortable win. Despite distaste for his hauteur and liberal populism, the understanding that voters will not give a majority to the hard-Right held firm. Still, with 40 per cent of French voters opting for Marine Le Pen, creeping sympathy for her sorts of solutions is undeniable. So is popular affinity for her plucky language of sovereignty rather than the vainglorious pro-EU ideology espoused by Macron.

These sobering realities prompted a rare attempt at humility by Macron in his victory speech, a promise that he will be a president for everyone. But does anyone think he is capable of that? Political trends in France speak to a deeper malaise afflicting the West. There is a rising feeling among both citizens and some politicians that the liberal order no longer has the answers – that a worldview that promises stability and prosperity through multilateralism and global commerce is inadequate and flawed. And Macron is the epitome of that worldview, a man who also happens to have devastated the mainstream political parties that might otherwise have been capable of finding a way through the extremes.

But there is another reason why Brussels should be feeling skittish. British commentators have long predicted the EU’s demise, predictions that have been confounded as it has found a way to muddle through. The Union has hardly emerged stronger from debacles such as the eurozone crisis, and it has failed to find a solution to agitators like Orbán in Hungary and Salvini in Italy, but nor has it been destroyed by its internal contradictions.

This time might be different. Macron’s first phone call after his re-election to an international leader was to the German Chancellor, Olaf Scholz. His first visit is expected to be to Berlin, as well. France holds the EU presidency, and Macron is to make a major speech next month further articulating his vision for the European Union. Evidently, it is a vision that will rely on the so-called Franco-German axis – long deemed to be the “motor” of further integration.

Indeed, although their relationship has been characterised by division and jealousy, Germany and France have managed to forge a two-pronged geopolitical vision, which has in turn has defined the EU. On the one hand, France has for decades been enchanted by the notion of a “multipolar” world to counteract American “hyperpower”. This sentiment, reinforced by the Iraq war, dates back to Charles de Gaulle, who sought to keep Britain out of the EEC at least partly due to his belief that London was too close to Washington. The German political class, meanwhile, has been devoted to the ideal of the benevolent economic superpower – one which keeps the peace through trade. This has been the German disposition at least since Willy Brandt’s Ostpolitik policy of the 1960s, which sought to ease tensions between West Germany and East through commerce.

These two principles – multipolarity and economic integration – are crystallised in the EU project itself. The basic point of Brussels is to secure superpower status as an ever-expanding regulatory bloc that can offset – or perhaps one day even rival – the United States. In the face of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the principles on which this grand vision were built have collapsed. The myth that the likes of Russia and China can be integrated into the liberal order has been demolished. Macron’s mortifying attempts to reason with Putin on the eve of the Ukraine war were the tip of the iceberg. Paris’s bid in recent years to cultivate a “special relationship” with Russia by engaging it on issues from climate change to Iran now looks absurdly naive.

The Ukraine war has also destroyed the notion that economic integration and close trading relationships are enough to restrain the worst impulses of autocrats. This clearly undermines Germany’s aim to be an influential global player without having to commit to spending properly on defence or taking sides in conflicts.

But it also threatens the relevance of an EU that Germany and France have each sought to nurture in their own image. The European Union embodies both Macron’s vaunting multilateralism and Germany’s rigid preference for economic over military power. As the West is plunged into a new Cold War, questions of military capability and independent sovereignty have come to the forefront. On the first issue the EU, which lacks its own collective fighting force, is irrelevant; on the second issue, the expansionist Brussels project is problematically ambivalent.

Crucially, the Franco-German liberal worldview that bolsters the EU has been exposed as not just misguided, but ethically bankrupt. Germany’s reluctance to scrap Nordstream 2 is a stain on its international image. The revelation that France and Germany have in recent years evaded an arms embargo to sell £230 million of military hardware to Russia, which is probably being used in the conflict, is astonishing. Never has it been on clearer display that the two dominating EU powers seek only to serve themselves.

The newfound moral confidence of other European countries puts their behaviour to shame. Poland in particular has quietly become an assertive actor – not the narrow-minded nationalist one of Brussels lore, but a strong, Atlanticist power with absolute moral clarity about what the stakes are in Ukraine. The three Baltic States, Latvia, Estonia and Lithuania, have shown impressive resolve, too, ceasing imports of Russian gas. Sweden and Finland continue to defy Russian aggression as they inch closer to joining Nato.

Clearly then an alternative, heretical notion of European power is fighting for oxygen – one that reveres the rights of sovereign nations and recognises the importance of military prowess. One that is friendly towards America (and Britain!) rather than antagonistic. As it stands, though, as long as it remains dominated by blinkered French and German elites, the EU courts geopolitical oblivion.