As goes France, so goes the EU
French voters hold the Continent’s
future in their hands.
By PAUL
TAYLOR 4/6/17, 4:05 AM CET
PARIS — When France sneezes, Europe catches pneumonia.
Rarely have the French faced a starker choice of European
futures than in this year’s presidential election, where they’ll vote for
“bye-bye European Union” or “back to a Europe of Nations” or even “fast forward
to a more integrated Union.”
If the opinion polls are accurate and fickle voters, angry
with the political class, don’t change their minds at the ballot box, the
second-round run-off on May 7 is likely to pit anti-EU nationalist Marine Le Pen
against pro-EU centrist Emmanuel Macron. Still in contention in the first round
on April 24 are conservative Gaullist François Fillon and evergreen leftist
Jean-Luc Mélenchon.
Le Pen has promised to take France out of the euro and the
Schengen open-border zone, reintroduce the franc currency and reimpose border
controls and trade barriers, and has said she will call a referendum on leaving
the European Union altogether within six months if the bloc isn’t receptive to
her proposals for a radical treaty renegotiation.
It is no exaggeration to say that a Le Pen victory could
deal a fatal blow to the eurozone and the EU, which can survive a Brexit but
would be mortally wounded by a Frexit. Germany’s federal elections on September
24 matter too, but are less uncertain — the German vote is bound to produce
another coalition led by one or the other pro-European mainstream party. For
now, all eyes are on Paris.
“Europe is locking us up, Europe is
forbidding us, Europe is bullying us” — Marine Le Pen
France, unlike Britain — which joined the EU late and was
always semi-detached — has been a central pillar of European construction from
the outset. Its passions and tantrums have dictated the tempo and shape of
integration.
From the failure of the European Defense Community to the
Treaty of Rome, from De Gaulle’s vetoes of Britain’s first membership bids to
the “empty chair” crisis and the “Luxembourg compromise”; from the creation of
the European Monetary System and the euro to the rise and fall of the proposed
European Constitution, the European project has advanced or retreated at
France’s pace.
The result of the May 7 vote, and of subsequent
parliamentary elections in June, will determine whether the EU is plunged into
existential crisis or given a new lease of life with the prospect of a
Franco-German grand bargain to deepen European economic, monetary and defense
cooperation.
Neither French front-runner can necessarily count on a
parliamentary majority to implement their program and their promises may well
be tempered by the influence of the political and business establishment.
Yet in the wake of Britain’s vote to leave the EU and the
election of Donald Trump in the United States, the choice between isolationism
and internationalism, between a closed, protectionist, angry France and an
open, economically liberalizing, optimistic one is a litmus test that will
shape Europe’s future for years to come.
“Europe is locking us up, Europe is forbidding us, Europe is
bullying us,” Le Pen declared during a television debate among the main candidates
last month. “I don’t aspire to administer what would have become a mere region
of the European Union. I don’t wish to be vice-chancellor to [German Chancellor
Angela] Merkel.”
Aware that her plan for an economic and monetary leap into
the unknown scares the middle-class voters she needs to win over to reach 50
percent in the runoff, Le Pen has kept quiet about leaving the euro, seeking,
instead, to project a reassuring “I’m-on-your-side” image and appear
stateswoman-like by meeting Russian President Vladimir Putin or addressing the
parliament in Chad.
Perhaps surprisingly, given the current grumpy,
Euroskeptical mood in France, polls predict the most pro-European candidate,
39-year-old favorite Macron, has the best chance of beating the far-right leader
in the run-off. This despite his avowed support for pooling more sovereignty in
the eurozone and building a European defense union in close partnership with
Germany.
Ten of eleven candidates running in the French presidential
election, ahead of the second television debate
In one of the rare dramatic exchanges in this week’s
marathon TV debate among the 11 candidates, he accused Le Pen of proposing
“economic war.”
Macron, who was top economic adviser and then economy
minister under Socialist President François Hollande before resigning last
year, is the only candidate who has promised to adhere to France’s
much-neglected European obligation to bring its budget deficit below 3 percent
of gross domestic product. His commitment to fiscal responsibility and economic
reform, and his sudden rise to front-runner, won him an audience with Merkel
last month after the center-right German chancellor had declined to make time
for him — probably out of tribal loyalty to her French conservative allies —
when he visited Berlin in January.
The leader of the grass-roots movement En Marche! is taking
political risks — not only by embracing “more ambitious European integration”
but also by hailing Merkel’s decision to welcome roughly 1 million refugees and
migrants in the summer of 2015 as a move that saved Europe’s “collective
dignity.” Merkel’s open-door policy has been widely criticized in France, where
Hollande accepted EU’s mandated quota of refugees as quietly and
unenthusiastically as possible and was relieved when it turned out that few refugees
came.
Macron is backed by federalists including liberal MEP Sylvie
Goulard, who accompanied him to Germany, and former Greens leader Daniel
Cohn-Bendit. He chose Berlin’s Humboldt University, where former German Foreign
Minister Joschka Fischer called for a “European federation” in a celebrated
speech in 2000, to issue his own call for a eurozone budget with a borrowing
capacity to fund public investment and help protect countries hit by economic
shocks, as well as a European defense fund to finance military research and
joint arms procurement.
The third man in the race, Fillon, offers a more
sovereignty-focused approach to the EU, saying in Tuesday’s debate, “It’s time
for France to take back the controls of the European Union.”
But, dogged by successive scandals for using taxpayers’
money to employ family members as political aides, Fillon has struggled to gain
traction with his vision of a more inter-governmental Europe of nation states.
Fillon has vowed to shrink the regulatory intrusion of the
European Commission and put a directorate of national leaders in charge of the
eurozone, taking fiscal supervision away from the EU executive. He backs a
powerful Franco-German axis “because without a strong entente between our two
countries, there would be no Europe, and our continent would be open to the
Americans, the Russians, the Chinese.”
Firebrand leftist orator Mélenchon
has said he would demand a complete negotiation of the EU treaties to put an
end to fiscal austerity.
Merkel has been publicly reserved about Fillon — especially
since the scandal broke, the day after his visit to Berlin, an occasion he used
to criticize her immigration policy. A German source said the chancellor was
impressed by the determination he expressed to roll back the frontiers of the
state and face down the trade unions but was aware of the resistance to reform
in France.
Meanwhile, the champions of the divided French left — with
little to no chance of surviving the first round of elections — vie with
utopian visions of a reinvented free-lunch socialist Europe.
Firebrand leftist orator Mélenchon has said he would demand
a complete negotiation of the EU treaties to put an end to fiscal austerity,
make the European Central Bank print money to fund investment and write off
government debt, and impose a European “protectionism of solidarity” to shield
jobs. Asked how he would convince other Europeans, notably the Germans, to
accept such change, he told an audience this week, “We can afford to create a
balance of forces and threaten to walk out, because we are not [Prime Minister
Alexis] Tsipras’ Greece, we are France.”
Ultimately, the European future that emerges from France’s
ballot boxes may hinge above all on the next president’s ability to revive the
economy with reforms that restore a more balanced partnership with Germany.
Paul Taylor writes POLITICO‘s Europe At Large.
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