François-Xavier Bellamy was named EU election lead candidate for the conservative Les Républicains party (EPP) late on Monday (15 January) amid Emmanuel Macron’s poaching of key conservative figures for his new government.
Bellamy is “a remarkable EU lawmaker which has given the conservatives delegation [at the European Parliament] and France more influence than ever,” LR President Eric Ciotti told French TV broadcaster TF1 on Monday.
In an interview with daily Le Figaro, published on Tuesday (16 January), Bellamy said he was ready to “give it all” to a campaign that “will shape the future of our political family, but also French democratic life”.
He vowed to angle his campaign on immigration and EU security.
“We must rebuild Europe in a way that gives our democracies more control over their own destinies. This supposes the trading of suffocating norms and standards for realistic strategies,” he added.
Bellamy, a philosophy teacher before getting to the European parliament, has mostly been actively on fishery policy and was a vocal defender of Armenia during Azerbaijan’s blitzkrieg war in the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict in October.
French far-right vows EU blocking majority against ‘federalist coup d'état’
French far right National Rally (Rassemblement National) chief Jordan Bardella has vowed to work together with other anti-EU forces to create a blocking majority and essentially kill what he described as a “federalist coup d’état” pushed forward by Europhiles.
Existential crisis
Bellamy’s appointment comes at a time of almost-existential crisis for the French conservative family – and days after Macron poached two leading figures, Rachida Dati and Catherine Vautrin, to fill cabinet seats.
The LR, once a leading moderate right-wing party, paid a hefty price with Macron’s arrival on the political scene in 2017 and essentially split open in two factions. The more liberal wing moved rather swiftly to Macron, while its more radical counterpart veered closer to far-right narratives.
There is a belief among some conservative executives that combatting the extreme right requires taking on some of their ideas and “stomping on their turf”, Jean-Yves Camus, a scholar specialised in the European far-right, had told Euractiv in a conversation back in December, at the helm of an immigration law.
The bill had passed with conservative and far-right votes in France, though the content had gone so right-wing it is possible the Constitutional Council, France’s highest justice body, may find some of it to run against the Constitution.
But this doesn’t seem to work – in fact, it’s backfiring. “There is no country like France where the conservative party is so marginalised,” Camus added. The LR slumped to 4.78% of the vote in the 2022 presidential elections and 8.48% in the 2019 European elections, for which Bellamy was lead candidate.
In the interview with Le Figaro, Bellamy dismisses any political connivance with the far-right Rassemblement National (RN) party. Unlike them, or Eric Zemmour’s racist party Reconquête, “no one but us is working as hard [on EU matters],” the candidate said.
According to polling data from Europe Elects, a partner of Euractiv, a right-wing bloc may reach a blocking majority in June 2024, with Identity & Democracy (ID) and European Conservatives and Reformists group (ECR) parliamentary groups coming third and fourth place, behind the right-wing EPP and left-wing S&D.
[Edited by Alice Taylor]
Read more with Euractiv
French far-right vows EU blocking majority against ‘federalist coup d’état’In today’s edition of the Capitals, find out more about German farmers halting protests to negotiate with the government, a leak about Catalan leaders being unlawfully investigated by the former government, and so much more.
Source: euractiv.com
