Macron rattled as EU election defeat looms
President cracks the whip as his campaign stutters
amid a widening gap between centrists and the far right.
Six months ago, Macron’s Renew coalition was trailing
the far right by five percent, according to aggregated polls. |
MARCH 27,
2024 4:36 AM CET
BY CLEA
CAULCUTT AND SARAH PAILLOU
PARIS — French President Emmanuel Macron is turning
up the heat on his lieutenants ahead of the European election as the far-right
National Rally continues to build on its seemingly unstoppable momentum.
Macron’s
game plan ahead of the EU election for tackling the National Rally’s
unrelenting rise was to dramatize the fight against the far-right party,
emphasizing the clash of ideologies and the Russian threat, according to
several French officials. The twin aim was to beat abstention and mobilize
Macron’s own voters, and also dissuade voters from turning to rival
pro-European candidates such as the Socialist Raphaël Glucksmann and the
ecologists.
But several
weeks into the campaign, the strategy has failed to deliver, according to
recent polls, and alarm bells are starting to ring. A recent study by IFOP put
the far right, led by National Rally President Jordan Bardella, at 30 percent
of the vote vs. 21 percent for Macron’s Renew coalition, with Glucksmann
polling at 11 percent.
Six months
ago, Renew was trailing the far right by 5 points, according to aggregated
polls.
With
plummeting popularity ratings and a soaring public deficit, Macron and his
party have an uphill battle to claw back support. And their answer to the
National Rally’s relentless rise is to punch back hard.
This month,
the lead candidate of Macron’s Renaissance party Valérie Hayer compared the
far-right leader Marine Le Pen with Edouard Daladier, the pre-war French PM who
signed the 1938 Munich agreement with Hitler. “It’s the same words, the same
arguments, the same debates. We are in Munich in 1938,” she said.
“In some of
its behaviors, the National Rally acts as a spokesperson for Moscow,” said
Renew MEP Marie-Pierre Vedrenne, doubling down on the anti-RN rhetoric. “If
we’d have listened to the National Rally, we’d have Frexit, Sputnik vaccines
and we’d have supported Russia” against Ukraine, she continued.
Meanwhile,
the French president has been upping the anti-Russia rhetoric on the
international scene, with hawkish comments about not ruling out sending Western
troops to Ukraine, and the need for Europeans not to be “cowards.”
Upping the pressure
Privately,
Macron has turned his frustration with the campaign on his allies. Last
Wednesday, he gathered several party heavyweights at the Elysée Palace,
including Foreign Affairs Minister Stéphane Séjourné and campaign director
Pieyre-Alexandre Anglade.
According
to two participants at the meeting, the president called on his troops to
better defend the track record of Renew MEPs. “We need a wake-up call for our
troops, we need to mobilize a lot more,” the president said, according to one
of the participants who was granted anonymity to discuss a sensitive issue.
“Right now,
there is more commentary than mobilization, I would like that to change,” he
added, according to the same participant.
This is not
the first time that the president has made his displeasure known. During the
Covid pandemic, the president reprimanded his teams over the slowness of the
vaccination campaign in France, with the effect of accelerating the campaign
but also distancing himself from the shortcomings of his administration.
With less
than three months to go before the European parliamentary election in June,
Macron’s alliance of centrist parties in France hasn’t quite found its stride
in the campaign, said a person with knowledge of the campaign, who like others
quoted here, was granted anonymity to discuss a sensitive topic. “The coalition
struggles to find its place in a campaign where none of the [national] MPs are
running, where there are no constituencies to fight for,” he said. “MPs and
ministers aren’t yet at 100 percent in the campaign. “
But some
allies have also expressed doubts publicly and privately about the president’s
strategy of dramatizing the ideological fight with the far right.
Francois
Bayrou, a French centrist and one of Macron’s earliest supporters, has said the
far right shouldn’t be “the only topic of the campaign,” adding that it was “a
gift” to focus so much attention on the National Rally
One MP
belonging to Macron’s Renaissance party said targeting RN “helps rally” voters,
but he was more in favor of a “50/50” approach that also focused on other
issues. “We need to insist on our European credibility and send press the idea
that we succeeded on many issues” such as the EU’s common agricultural policy,
border agency Frontex and the Green Deal, he said.
That
message has partially been heard, with a second phase of the campaign expected
in April, with new proposals.
Double-edged sword
Some have
heard Macron’s message loud and clear. This weekend, Prime Minister Gabriel
Attal, who remains popular among the public, was out on the stump, leafleting
with Renaissance’s little-known lead candidate Valérie Hayer.
Macron is
also starting to personally hit the campaign trail. Last week, he was in the
port city of Marseille, trying in a working class district to sell his track
record on fighting inner-city crime and drugs gangs. The French president also
went to great lengths to end a rebellion by French farmers, killing off the
Mercosur trade deal with South American countries and lobbying for greater
restrictions on Ukrainian food imports.
In January,
Macron’s party laboriously pushed through an immigration bill, which has
accelerated the removal of failed asylum seekers and tightened welfare benefits
for foreigners. In the process, the French president risked splitting his
coalition to pass a bill meant to showcase his increasingly hard line on
illegal immigration and siphon away voters from the right and far right.
Many inside
Macron’s camp also hope the widening gap between the National Rally and the
centrists will start to close as election day approaches. “The National Rally
is high. But I know they have been overestimated in the past, there is a craze
of saying ‘I’m going to vote for Bardella’ but are people really going to ?”
asked Renew MEP Gilles Boyer.
According
to OpinionWay pollster Bruno Jeanbart, the real test for the centrists will be
when Macron really enters the campaign, most likely in the last weeks before
the June election.
“He is the
only one who can mobilize, the party can’t mobilize. Each time Macron has
entered the campaign, it has had an impact,” said Jeanbart.
But while
Macron has a galvanizing effect on his voters, he can also be a repellent. “He
has a paradoxical impact; he is able to mobilize, but at the same time he makes
arguments for people to vote against him, in favor of Bardella,” Jeanbart said.
Anthony Lattier contributed reporting.
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