Emmanuel Macron’s appointment of rising star Gabriel Attal as the new French prime minister on Tuesday is taking the EU elections campaign up a notch – but it’s not without risks of backfiring, and rolling out the red carpet for the far-right.
Attal’s nomination is historic in many ways: the 34-year-old is France’s youngest prime minister (the previous title holder, Laurent Fabius, was 37 when he took up the role in 1984), and openly gay, with a 10-year career to show for himself – as a special advisor, MP, and minister.
More importantly, he is currently France’s most popular political figure with a 40% approval rate, stealing first place from former prime minister and presidential-hopeful Edouard Philippe, and taking a 4% lead over far-right Rassemblement national (RN) president and EU lead candidate Jordan Bardella.
This is largely explained by the work he did during his short stint as education minister, during which he pushed for the (re)introduction of mandatory school uniform – an experimental trial is planned in the spring – and the banning of Abayas, a traditional Muslim womenswear deemed contrary to the principles of laïcité.
Both measures are at the core of right-wing values. As numbers show, his popularity soared threefold with the conservatives in almost three years, with a meteoric rise since his education appointment in July.
This is no minor point in guiding Macron’s decision, as his Renaissance party is trailing well behind Marine Le Pen’s far-right Rassemblement national in EU polls, in an election that has historically, and repeatedly, seen the RN come on top. Tapping into the territory of the right and far-right – if only to expand the pool of potential voters – is of pressing importance.
Macron’s flirtation with the conservatives is not breaking news: He needs the support of conservative Les Républicains (LR) as he lacks an absolute majority in the National Assembly, and will go to great lengths to cajole them, as December’s not-so-liberal immigration bill shows.
Once a piece of legislation that sought to find a delicate balance between the need to stem irregular migration and regularise working migrants, the final text has veered right, with measures that closely mirror RN’s most outrageous ‘national preference’ demands.
LR core voters are themselves also leaning more and more towards the far-right – the party’s chief Eric Ciotti said he would be ready to vote for racist anti-immigration candidate Eric Zemmour in the 2022 presidential elections – and so may be receptive to someone like Attal getting the top job.
Moreover, appointing a young “telegenic, fluent, and pugnacious” figure, as Eurasia Group’s Europe lead Mujtaba Rahman put it, may be just the right move to give the campaign a powerful push and bring Attal and Bardella at least head-to-head, in the hope of turning polls upside down.
“He’s warm and accessible,” French Renew lawmaker Stéphanie Yon-Courtin told Euractiv. “He transcends generational and political lines, appealing to the right and left alike.”
But Attal’s popularity may not be quite enough to carry the Macronists to election days in June – and what on the surface is a smart move may fall short of securing any significant political gains.
Singing from the right and far-right hymn sheet rarely translates into bringing voters closer to centrist circles – it only reinforces the parties one is trying to copy.
“There exists the view in centre and liberal right circles that one can best fight the far-right by taking on their policy proposals, but that’s never worked,” Jean-Yves Camus, a political scientist, told Euractiv back in December.
And so RN’s party whip Marine Le Pen celebrated an “ideological victory” with the immigration bill. Yesterday, Robert Ménard, a journalist-turned-extreme right political ideologue and mayor of French city Béziers, praised Attal for implementing education reforms “the far-right was always in favour of”.
Let us not get confused: This is no political success, but a far-right kiss of death, as extreme narratives continue to be normalised across the board.
The thought that getting cosier to the right may bring voters back to Renaissance ahead of EU elections is also misleading.
“Vote transfers from the liberal-minded LR to Macron happened years ago,” Antoine Bristielle of the Jean-Jaurès Foundation, a think-tank, told Euractiv.
In other words, reserves of fence-sitting voters are running dry. “The remaining core LR voter is already of the view that there should be closer collaboration with the far-right,” Bristielle said.
As for political leaders’ popularity, they tend to crash the moment they take on the prime minister role – better known as ‘l’enfer de Matignon’, named after the prime minister’s official residence.
Betting on high polls today says nothing of what the playing field will look like in June, and sustained popularity until then is not a given, Mathieu Gallard, a pollster, also warned.
The parliamentary calendar is light for the next few months and Attal will mostly be busy putting together Macron’s new “social and civic rearmament”, a series of education-led measures such as the extension of school uniform trials, which require no legislative changes.
This may preserve some of his initial aura.
But going more right-wing in the hope of turning the tide against the RN may backfire in violent ways and only further blur the line between Macronism and the far-right.
The Roundup
With Russia’s war on Ukraine entering its third calendar year, Moscow is counting on time and weakening Western resolve, emboldened by seeing that the US and the EU are struggling to provide new funding for Kyiv despite having promised open-ended support.
The European Commission is preparing to push back on a US-led attempt to exempt the private sector from the world’s first international treaty on Artificial Intelligence while pushing for as much alignment as possible with the EU’s AI Act.
Some of Germany’s most influential business and green lobbying groups have joined forces to urge Berlin to quickly adopt a carbon management strategy in order to kickstart the country’s industrial transformation.
France and Czechia reiterated calls on Tuesday for the European Commission to put nuclear power on an equal footing with renewable energies in all EU policies, putting traditional nuclear sceptic countries on the defensive.
Norwegian lawmakers greenlighted deep-sea mining exploration around the Arctic archipelago of Svalbard on Tuesday, a world first that has raised concerns among environmental groups.
Internal Market Commissioner Thierry Breton pitched on Tuesday a €100 billion fund to boost EU defence industry production and collaboration between countries, companies and other stakeholders.
Last but not least, check out our Health Brief for a weekly wrap of health-related news.
Look out for…
- Informal meeting of employment and social affairs ministers Wednesday-Friday.
- Commissioner Paolo Gentiloni takes part in exchange of views on EU Semester with European Parliament’s ECON committee on Thursday.
- Commission Vice-President Maroš Šefčovič receives Carsten Spoor, CEO of Lufthansa Group on Thursday.
Views are the author’s
[Edited by Zoran Radosavljevic/Nathalie Weatherald]
Source: euractiv.com
