Tuesday was ‘Europe Day’, or as the European Union proclaimed on its website, the occasion to ‘celebrate peace and unity’ and give thanks to Robert Schuman. It was the French statesman’s declaration on 9 May 1950 that put in place the framework ‘for a new form of political cooperation in Europe’.

No leader in Europe marked the day quite as enthusiastically as Emmanuel Macron. His Renaissance party tabled a bill on Tuesday in the National Assembly demanding that every village and town hall throughout France be made to fly the EU flag alongside the French tricolour.

One wonders what they made of Macron’s ‘Together, united’ declaration in Rome

The President of France will certainly support the bill such is his zeal for the EU. In a statement published on his official Twitter account, Macron hailed Europe Day with the same joy French presidents once reserved for Bastille Day. ‘Europe has protected us from crises,’ declared Macron with his customary confidence. ‘It will also enable us to create jobs, security and order in a world of peril. Let’s see how.’

Macron then listed some of Europe’s stunning achievements of late, at least in his own eyes. During the Covid pandemic, boasted Macron, ‘it is our democracies that have taken the necessary steps to protect our most vulnerable compatriots’.

Macron didn’t elaborate, but presumably the necessary steps he had in mind were locking the young and healthy in their homes for months on end, shutting schools, restaurants, shops and small businesses, thereby crippling the economy, and causing an epidemic of mental health problems among the young.

Macron then crowed that it was the EU’s ‘open societies that have been able to use science to develop, produce and deliver vaccines to the world’. He forgot to mention how he cast doubt on the efficacy of the AstraZeneca vaccine. Or the fact that in his own ‘open society’ he introduced a Covid passport that effectively prevented people living normal lives unless they had submitted to three vaccines.

Moving on, Macron called the EU’s response to the war in Ukraine ‘historic’, and said the member states had ‘acted quickly and strongly, in solidarity’. That doesn’t quite tally with President Volodymyr Zelensky’s take on the EU response, which he described in January as indecisive, urging them to ‘think faster’. It also wilfully ignores the increasingly loud clamouring from some corners of Europe for restoring more normal business relations with Russia.

And so it continued in the same vein: the economy, Net Zero, digital innovation, hydrogen energy, the fight against misinformation. In all of these areas Macron bragged that the ‘European Union has taken the lead. It shows the way to the rest of the world’.

The purpose of Macron’s address was a celebration of Europe Day but also a reiteration of his belief, stated last month, that Europe must strive for greater ‘strategic autonomy’ and not be a ‘vassal of the US. ‘Europe is about solidarity, green jobs, protection and leverage in the face of changes in the world,’ he concluded. ‘Together, united.’

In a speech in which the emphasis was on European solidarity and protection it was perhaps inevitable that Macron omitted the ‘I’ word. On a day of celebration, bringing up immigration would have peed on the EU’s parade.

Macron’s state of denial continues, as does his hypocrisy. One can only marvel that the French president had the front to laud European unity days after France and Italy fell out once more over the migrant crisis.

The row, sparked last week by France’s Interior Minister Gerald Darmanin, continues to rumble on. On Monday Italy’s PM Giorgia Meloni issued a warning to Paris, saying: ‘I would advise caution over using other governments to settle domestic political accounts, because that’s something not usually done.’

France’s response to the surge in migrants entering Europe through Italy this year – 44,737 and counting – has been the despatch of police reinforcements to their shared border to bar the way of those seeking to enter France illegally.

French journalists have also been on the border in the wake of last week’s row with Italy, among them a reporter from the Macron-friendly broadcaster BFMTV. Last Friday he conducted an interview live on air with a young man from Guinea, who had just been refused entry for the umpteenth time to France.

Aboubakar was not downhearted and vowed to keep trying. ‘I want to live in France,’ he said. ‘France is freedom, equality and fraternity, so I’m going to come back again.’ He wasn’t alone, he explained, telling the reporter there are ‘lots’ more migrants waiting to cross the Mediterranean, particularly Tunisians, and he doubted there was anything Europe could do to stop them. ‘We will invade you,’ he said. ‘As long as you don’t give us peace of mind, we will come to you.’

This was not a young man playing to the camera. As the Financial Times reported last month – quoting Josep Borrell, the EU’s foreign policy chief – the dire economic situation in Tunisia may ‘push as many as 900,000 people across the Mediterranean towards Europe via Italy this year’. These are not only alarming figures, they are unmanageable for a continent already struggling to cope with the huge influx of migrants in the last decade.

One wonders what they made of Macron’s ‘Together, united’ declaration in Rome. Not so much solidarity as cynicism.