Europe’s far-right wins big with Macron’s migration bill

Marine Le Pen’s support for French President Emmanuel Macron’s tough immigration bill on Tuesday (19 December) signifies another victory for Europe’s far-right this year, just months ahead of critical EU elections.

The new and hotly-contested immigration bill is much tougher than the government’s initial text, severely curtailing migrants’ access to citizenship, rights to social benefits and family reunification procedures.

Both the conservative Les Républicains (LR) and far-right Rassemblement National (RN) MPs weighed in on the content of the text, with their votes instrumental in having the bill adopted.

This in turn caused one of the most critical French political upsets of the past 30 years – with a large number of Macron’s own MPs voting against it.

Meanwhile, RN Marine Le Pen celebrated that the adopted legislation marked an “ideological victory”, while the LR whip Olivier Marleix told journalists that “98%” of the final text reflected conservative views.

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Broken the dam

To left-leaning parties, alongside a large number of civil society organisations, this ad hoc, bill-specific coalition has put the cordon sanitaire – mainstream parties’ shared understanding that the far-right should be kept at bay from policy-making decisions – at risk.

“French president Emmanuel Macron has broken the dam against the far right,” European Green Party co-chair and French senator Mélanie Vogel said in a statement on Wednesday (20 December): “This text will implement measures that the far-right has been advocating for decades”.

“The cordon-sanitaire exists to keep extremist, far-right policies off the legislative agenda. If you lower the cordon sanitaire, you normalise the far-right which is bad news for France and bad news for Europe,” Gaby Bischoff, a German MEP and Vice President of the S&D Group, told Euractiv.

In similar declarations, a The Left group spokesperson said they were “dismayed” that the extreme right had voted for the French bill. The Left co-president, Manon Aubry accused Macron on X of selling “[his] soul to the devil”.

The Renew Group, Macron’s political force at the EU level, however, argued that the extreme right continued to be kept at bay despite the immigration bill vote since “there was no negotiations nor agreement with the far right”, and that “the text would have passed without the votes of RN [Le Pen’s party]”.

“Le Pen’s decision to vote the text was pure political tactic,” the Renew spokesperson said.

Centre-right European People’s Party (EPP) and national-conservative European Conservatives and Reformists (ECR) political groups at the European Parliament did not respond to Euractiv’s request for comment.

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Far-right winning streak

Political alliances between mainstream political parties and their far-right opponents are hardly new.

In late September 2022, Italy’s Giorgia Meloni took power through the means of a conservative and far-right coalition. In June 2023, the Spanish conservatives and their far-right counterparts Vox then struck governing deals in several municipalities and regions, ahead of legislative elections.

Finland and Sweden have integrated far-right parties as part of their governing coalitions. And the jury is still out on the state of the Netherlands, as backroom deal-making continues after Geert Wilders’s victory in November.

Far-right parties are also topping the polls in Austria and France, and number two in Romania, and Germany, according to Europe Elects data.

And now, all eyes are on EU elections polls, which predict that the far-right Identity & Democracy (ID) group, and ECR, could garner up to 169 seats combined after the June vote.

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Conservatives’ crisis

In the European Parliament, predicted election outcomes suggest the cordon sanitaire isn’t quite on the verge of collapse – yet. The traditional centrist majority composed of socialists (S&D), centre-right (EPP) and liberals (Renew) would prevail, and all have said they would be willing to keep collaborating.

At the same time, the contours between the far-right and traditional conservative forces are getting blurred, Théo Verdier at the Jean Jaurès Foundation told Euractiv.

Unlike 10 years ago, when Marine Le Pen was so adamantly against the EU, Hungary’s Viktor Orban had just coined the term ‘illiberal democracy’ and Matteo Salvini’s Northern League revelled in provocative political outbursts, “things just aren’t as straightforward”, Verdier explained.

Traditional conservative parties are facing an almost existential crisis across Europe, with many of them adopting far-right narratives to snatch voters and openly collaborating with them, like in the Netherlands or Spain, for example.

The ‘existential crisis’ is partly due to the general belief within right-wing circles 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, told Euractiv.

“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.

In this vein, French conservatives have slowly but surely veered further towards the right, especially on immigration and identity politics, hoping to take potential RN voters while carving out their own space between the far right and Macron’s Renaissance party.

Ultimately, conservatives in France and the EU “are splitting in two, with one faction having no problem associating with the far right”, Verdier told Euractiv.

To such conservatives, he said, the very idea of a political dam “just makes no sense” and some form of alliance between the EPP, the ECR and ID groups is a good idea.

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EU identity mal-être

The shift in rightward politics, especially in the field of immigration, can also be explained by “a profound European identity mal-être”, or malaise, Verdier said.

The EU is “no longer developing demographically, it is particularly vulnerable to immigration waves and social spending levels are falling,” according to him.

So, a more ‘security-leaning’ response to the immigration crisis becomes the norm – and with that more likely coalitions with the extreme right.

As for left-wing forces, according to Camus, they have notably stayed clear from issues that have become “owned” by the far-right, first and foremost immigration, identity and the very French concept of secularism, laïcité.

EU elections may mark a turning point in the way right-wing politics are run in the Parliament – and France’s immigration bill gives just a slight sense of what this could look like.

[Edited by Benjamin Fox/Nathalie Weatherald]