The Brief – Macron courts progressive voters for EU elections

In the space of three weeks, French President Emmanuel Macron has declared himself in favour of several rather progressive measures. With EU elections just around the corner, is he trying to woo younger and left-wing voters?

Since his re-election in 2022, Macron has been behind a business-minded pension reform and a restrictive immigration law and now governs with a majority of right-wing ministers. But he seems to have changed tack as of late.

“Renaissance has gone from being an original all-purpose central party to a classic bourgeois and elderly centre-right party,” Gilles Filchenstein, director general of the Fondation Jean Jaurès, wrote in a recent note.

But the president of the ‘centre-right party’ graced the month of March with social advances, particularly when it comes to women’s rights.

On International Women’s Day, Macron said he was in favour of including the principle of consent in the criminal definition of rape, though he opposed it in Brussels in February.

A few days earlier, France became the first country to enshrine the right to abortion in its constitution, and last week, Macron announced his government would present a bill to legislate on the end of life.

For June’s EU elections, a recent poll by the Ipsos Institute put the far-right Rassemblement National (RN, ID) at the top with more than 31% of voting intentions, compared to 18% for Macron’s Renaissance (Renew), and 11.5% for the socialist coalition (S&D).

Hitting on left-wing voters?

The Fondation Jean Jaurès estimates that 20% of voters who voted for Macron in 2022 will vote for a left-wing list in the EU elections, mainly the one led by Raphaël Glucksmann.

Therefore one can rightly wonder whether Macron is trying to win back votes from the left.

However, French S&D, Member for the European Parliament (MEP), Sylvie Guillaume, told Euractiv this was “quite a risky strategy.”

“On the issue of rape, he will have to explain to us how he can do an about-face (turn) in less than a fortnight.”

S&D lawmakers in the European Parliament fought alongside other MEPs, notably from the EPP and Renew, to include a definition of rape based on consent in the directive on combating violence against women.

But France voted against it during the trilogues – negotiations between Parliament, Commission, and Council – even though MEPs of the presidential majority had asked Macron to review his position.

Macron finally changed his stance, but one month after the directive was adopted on 6 February, which irritated MEPs.

“What an instrumentalisation of the cause of women just a few weeks before the European elections,” French MEP Nathalie Colin-Oesterlé (EPP) told Euractiv.

“Macron realised that he had made a mistake and was going to be attacked during the EU election campaign. It’s manipulation and his left-wing allies will surely remind him of it,” she added.

Guillaume said that if Macron is indeed trying to win back “a bit of of the left and centre-left electorate, he’s taking people for fools. We’re not going to forget”.

Fellow French MEP Fabienne Keller (Renew) also speaking to Euractiv, was more forgiving saying people should be happy about Macron’s reversal.

Should they also be happy about the president’s desire to enshrine the right to abortion in the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights?

“It is technically impossible to do it,” said Colin-Oesterlé. “It’s just a publicity stunt to distract attention from the real issues in Europe.”

Can we then conclude that this is Macron’s political strategy? Keller would rather speak of momentum. “In politics, there are times when the lights are red, and there are times when you can make things happen,” she said.

The Roundup

Lawmakers on the European Parliament’s Agriculture Committee backed the Commission’s proposal to give farmers greater flexibility to slaughter animals on the farm and thus reduce the need for animal transport, but called for more assistance.

The EU’s industrial output as a share of total GDP will decline as a result of persistently high energy prices, the head of the world’s largest chemicals company has said, adding that such a “structural development” is not necessarily bad and may even be “healthy” for the European economy.

The measures to loosen some of the environmental requirements of the EU’s Common Agricultural Policy could come into force in 2024, with the European Parliament speeding up the approval of the Commission’s proposal and member states broadly supporting the initiative.

A new approach by the Belgian Presidency of the EU Council to the draft law to detect and remove online child sexual abuse material puts focus on the Coordinating Authority’s roles, such as risk categorisation or detection orders.

The European Investment Bank (EIB) may move one step closer to loosening its lending criteria as early as this Thursday, when it expects to get the final signal it needs from the bloc’s 27 member states to unlock more direct investment into defence, Euractiv understands.

Last but not least, check out this week’s Transport Brief: Railroading your competition is not the right track.

Look out for…

Enlargement Commissioner Olivér Várhelyi participates in EU-Ukraine Association Council on Wednesday.
UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres meets with top Commission officials on Wednesday.
Tripartite Social Summit on Wednesday.
Europan Council summit on Thursday-Friday.

Views are the author’s

[Edited by Zoran Radosavljevic/Alice Taylor]