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France has turned against Macron. Will Europe set
the stage for President Le Pen?
Paul Taylor
The president is trailing the hard right – and
forthcoming European elections could leave him a political lame duck
Wed 1 May
2024 08.00 CEST
In the
latest of his visionary speeches on the future of Europe, Emmanuel Macron
called for the EU to transform itself into a military power or face “death”.
Yet his own presidency of France may be about to enter a long twilight zone
unless he can reverse his party’s deepening slump in June’s European parliament
election.
Macron’s
unpopularity is the main reason why his centrist pro-European Renaissance party
is trailing a distant second in opinion polls behind Marine Le Pen’s hard-right
National Rally (RN). Le Pen’s list is led by Jordan Bardella, 29, the rising
star in the populist anti-immigration party. Renaissance, whose list is headed
by little-known MEP Valérie Hayer, is down to 17.5% in the latest survey while
the RN is on 31%. The two parties were neck-and-neck in the last European
election, five years ago .
The EU
ballot is seen as a test because it is the last scheduled national vote in
France before the 2027 presidential election, in which Le Pen is expected to
make her fourth, and most promising, bid for power.
Macron is
barely two years into his second term in the Élysée Palace, yet lacking a
parliamentary majority at home and with his government under the permanent
threat of a no-confidence motion, he risks becoming a premature lame duck. His
European influence is also at stake because the liberal group (Renew Europe)
his party sits with in the European parliament is set to lose seats, and the
number of liberal leaders is also shrinking as European electorates swing to
the right. Besides, France’s standing is diminished in the eyes of many by its
chronic high budget deficit and mounting debt, which is set to incur an EU
disciplinary procedure after the election.
The
46-year-old president mostly has himself to blame for his political
predicament. He has so personalised his style of governance that voters blame
him for everything from the cost of living to the rise of youth violence and
the risk of terrorism during this summer’s Paris Olympic Games.
“Macron
thinks it doesn’t matter that no one has heard of his lead candidate because
he’s convinced he can swing the pro-European vote behind his name,” a senior
MEP in the president’s own group told me. “Everything is decided at the Élysée
so we are waiting for the oracle.”
The party
still hasn’t agreed who will be on its list of candidates, due to be announced
on 7 May. Intense struggles continue behind the scenes between incumbent MEPs
clinging to their seats and the four allied centrist parties seeking to place
their own candidates, while the need for gender balance and pressure to field
some new faces all complicate the task. Of the French centrists’ 23 seats in
the outgoing parliament, pollsters reckon only 13 are safe on current ratings.
Renaissance
faces growing competition for centre-left voters from the other surprise star
of the campaign so far, Raphaël Glucksmann, leader of the small Place Publique
party, who heads the Socialist list and is credited with 13% in the latest
polls. The intellectual son of philosopher André Glucksmann, campaigning on a
platform of massive support for Ukraine and greater social justice, is
hoovering up disaffected Macron supporters as well as leftwingers alienated by
the strident pro-Palestinian rhetoric of hard-left leader Jean-Luc Mélenchon.
Indeed,
Mélenchon’s political career could be another casualty of this election. If, as
polls suggest, his La France Insoumise (France Unbowed) party finishes a
distant sixth in the vote, trailing not only the Socialists but also the
Ecologists, the 72-year-old firebrand’s ambition to lead the French left into
the 2027 presidential election will look threadbare.
At the
other end of the spectrum, the mainstream conservative party, Les Républicains
(LR), could be another victim of the June vote. The once mighty Gaullist
movement, riven by in-fighting and policy rifts, looks set to be dwarfed again
by Le Pen’s RN, which is consolidating its position as the leading force on the
French right, and the only one that has not yet had a chance at power.
Political
scientist and pollster Chloé Morin argued in a book entitled On aura tout
essayé (“We’ve tried everything else”), that Le Pen could win the next
presidential election because French voters feel that successive presidents of
the right, left and centre have failed to solve their problems or reverse what
many perceive as the decline of their country.
That may be
premature. There’s a long way till 2027 and Macron still has options to regain
momentum, even if none is easy. He could reshuffle his government again, but he
did that recently to little lasting effect. He could dissolve parliament and
force a new legislative election if a no-confidence motion passed, but that
might well hand victory to the RN. He could also call a referendum on some
popular issue, but voters might use it to punish an unpopular president.
Perhaps his
best hope of escaping his domestic predicament is to seize the vacant
leadership of Europe and drive forward the agenda he set out in his speech at
the Sorbonne. He called for a defence build-up funded by joint borrowing and a
more dirigiste and protectionist economic policy to compete with the US and
China. However, he will face a tough task convincing frugal Germans to raise
common debt to fund joint defence spending, free-trading Dutch, Nordics and
Poles to accept a “buy European” policy and smaller states to give up their
national vetoes over EU foreign policy.
Macron’s
big vision for Europe may not save his party from a drubbing in the election,
but it might just position him for a comeback on the EU stage if France can win
those arguments.
Paul Taylor
is a senior visiting fellow at the European Policy Centre
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