French far-right presidential candidate Marine Le Pen has softened her stance on France’s possible exit from the EU but her programme for the country, if elected, suggests otherwise. EURACTIV France reports.
Le Pen came second in the first voting round on 10 April, narrowly behind incumbent President Emmanuel Macron, setting the stage for a tight run-off on 24 April.
After years of saying she wants France to leave the EU and abandon the euro, the far-right candidate has now changed her tune, saying she wants to give the EU a chance, but under certain conditions.
“Frexit is by no means our project,” she told a press conference where she laid out her foreign policy ambitions on Wednesday (13 April) and noted that the cataclysm the “French ruling class” predicted after Brexit had not happened.
“We want to reform the EU from within,” she insisted, calling for “liberation from the Brussels straitjacket” to “look to the wider world”.
In her programme, Le Pen no longer mentions an EU or eurozone exit, issues she was keen to put to a referendum in 2017, where she also made it to the second election round. None of the 17 “thematic booklets” made available on her website is even dedicated to Europe.
But criticism of Brussels is still there.
This time, Le Pen aims to put “the supremacy of national law” to the vote to give France back “control over its destiny”. According to her programme, this would then pave the way for a “renegotiation of numerous secondary legislation texts, and even of the EU treaties themselves,” according to her programme.
She also wants to “re-establish permanent surveillance and control of our borders” by the French police and customs to compensate for the EU’s “serious failings”. Such a move, however, would question the free movement of goods and people, some of the bloc’s founding principles.
While Le Pen is no longer overtly calling for France to leave the EU, her programme is ambiguous on the matter.
Her ambitions for France would automatically push the country towards an exit – something she seems to know already, as she aims at “a European Alliance of Nations which is intended to gradually replace the European Union” and would require a French exit first.
Le Pen wants EU to be 'association of free nations'
After the defeat in the 2017 French presidential election, Marine Le Pen’s right-wing Rassemblement National renewed its discourse about Europe, aiming to appeal to a wider electorate, but it is uncertain if this shift will give Le Pen a shot at winning the keys to the Elysée Palace in April
Different packaging, same substance
“It’s just the packaging that has changed, in substance it’s the same,” EU lawmaker Stéphanie Yon-Courtin of Macron’s La République en Marche, part of the centrist Renew Europe group, told EURACTIV.
The MEP also criticised Le Pen’s “populist sovereignist rhetoric” and “irresponsibility” in her proposals to the French, as well as what she termed the “lack of reflection” behind this new vision for the EU. Yon-Courtin said that, regrettably, Le Pen is opting for an “à la carte Europe”.
“The European Union is not perfect” but Le Pen has the wrong enemy, she said, adding that “France is the first beneficiary of the CAP”, the EU’s massive farming subsidies programme, known as the Common Agricultural Policy.
Turning to the pandemic-related problems, Yon-Courtin wondered: “How would she have negotiated the purchases during COVID-19 with such an isolation strategy for France?”
Le Pen told a conference on Wednesday that she still favours an exit from NATO’s integrated military command. And unlike under Macron’s current five-year term, Le Pen has suggested that the traditional Franco-German power couple will no longer be a priority under her rule.
Yon-Courtin also cautioned that in case of Le Pen’s victory, she would be effectively presiding over France’s six-month EU Council presidency from 24 April to 30 June. “I am convinced that she [Le Pen] will want to have a say in the matter.”
Le Pen wants to stop military cooperation with Germany
French far-right presidential candidate Marine Le Pen said she would stop all joint arms programmes with Germany and instead propose a radical change in relations if elected on 24 April.
Le Pen’s announcement was made at a press conference on Wednesday …
[Edited by Zoran Radosavljevic]
Source: euractiv.com
