This morning, EU lawmaker François-Xavier Bellamy was named as the lead candidate for the French conservative Les Républicains party (EPP) – effectively kicking off France’s EU election campaign. On the side of the far right, the battle lines are being drawn as pro- or anti-Emmanuel Macron, while the left is looking to snatch the president’s pro-EU voters.
“The European elections are shaping up to be very complicated for the presidential majority,” far-right Rassemblement National (RN) lead candidate Jordan Bardella told journalists on Monday.
With precisely 145 days before French citizens go out to vote, it’s official: The campaign starting gun has fired.
Almost all main parties now have their own candidate: The Left’s Manon Aubry will “coordinate” the far-left La France Insoumise (LFI) list, and Marie Toussaint, also an EU lawmaker, will be the Greens’ lead.
Bardella has been the RN candidate for months now, and Eric Zemmour’s anti-Islam Reconquête party has put forward Marion Maréchal as their frontrunner. Bellamy will lead the conservatives’ charge.
On the left side of the aisle, Raphaël Glucksmann, co-president of the small social-democrat Place Publique (PP) party, is also gunning for the top spot and is expected to join forces with the Socialists – a move to be confirmed in early February. The Communists are running with Léon Deffontaines.
Unlike all of them, Macron’s ruling Renaissance party seems to be at a standstill. It’s still not clear who will replace its would-have-been lead candidate – ex-Renew boss Stéphane Séjourné – a respected lawmaker whose surprise nomination as French foreign minister last week threw electoral bets wide open all over again.
Aim for 2024, think 2027
Hoping to secure ‘first-mover’ advantage, the RN said months ago that the EU elections would be no more than a midterm vote, hoping to use them as an opportunity to slam Macron for alleged policy failures on immigration, security and secularism, and prevent a “federalist coup d’etat”.
“It’s two visions of Europe that are fighting: more immigration, more globalisation, greater submission to the US – or a return to true, genuine and democratic nation-statehood,” Thierry Mariani, an RN lawmaker, told Euractiv.
These elections must become a pro-or-against Macron referendum, the nitty-gritty of EU affairs be damned, has been Bardella’s main message. Whoever comes on top will gain surefire credibility in the set-up for the 2027 presidential vote – and in the RN, that’s what really matters.
“The RN’s moved beyond a blanket anti-EU rhetoric to go into the depth of policy issues – all the while nationalising debates into a binary pro-or-against-Macron narrative,” Théo Verdier, EU Observatory Director at the Jean-Jaurès Foundation, a think-tank, told a Euractiv conference back in November.
The RN has good reasons to hope. EU elections are a historical forte for them – and they’ve come first in both the 2014 and 2019 ballots. So far, 2024’s looking no different: they’re topping election polls with a 10-point lead on Macron’s Renaissance.
Less austerity, more federalism
Then comes the left. First speaking as one through the novel political coalition, NUPES, on the eve of the 2022 legislative elections, the group now seems more divided than ever, unable to find common ground on a large number of domestic policy issues, let alone the EU.
LFI’s flirt with the greens to lead the EU elections fight together earlier this year fell flat. The open-list, single-round elections system means the greens tend to perform better at the EU rather than the national level, and so they refused to compromise.
Glucksmann, who is shaping up as a potential consensus candidate, wants the EU’s free-trade, fair competition, and austerity traded for more federalism and “green protectionism”, a narrative that appears to be working somewhat: The latest polling data shows he would be the leading leftist party, with just under 10% of the total vote share.
As such, Macron’s people are increasingly worried that Glucksmann could syphon some of the centrist electorate and undermine the president’s claim to be the foundational pro-EU force.
Renaissance in waiting
And so, Renaissance.
As things stand, Macron’s EU campaign is lacking clear structure or strategy. With Séjourné gone, former health minister and government spokesperson Olivier Véran – an unknown figure in EU circles – is likely to take the lead.
Meanwhile, “telegenic” Gabriel Attal’s bold nomination as prime minister – at 34, France’s youngest ever – brings hopes he’ll take the fight against Bardella head-to-head.
“The president hopes that he will be able to narrow the polling lead of the far right […] Bardella, who is also plausible and telegenic—and even younger at 28,” Mujtaba Rahman, EU lead at the consultancy Eurasia Group said, but so far this has not translated into any significant changes in poll numbers.
Attal as prime minister “is no more than a comms stunt, it changes nothing to our strategy”, Jean-Paul Garraud, another RN EU lawmaker, told Euractiv.
A major press conference is being organised late on Tuesday, where Macron should outline key next steps leading up up to 2027, when his mandate ends for good, as he can do no more than two consecutive terms.
The aim is to “set the course of action for the new government at a time when the face of several decades can be set in a few months,” the Elysée said – whatever that means – in response to a request for comments by Euractiv.
Meanwhile, Macron’s political opponents have already left the starting blocks.
The Roundup
Most political groups in the European Parliament want a probe into the European Commission’s decision to unfreeze EU funds for Hungary, followed by a lawsuit in the EU’s top court and a possible no-confidence vote, while also urging the Council to strip Hungary’s voting rights over its rule of law deficiencies.
The EU needs “more and not less” supply from Kyiv, according to sugar-using food producers such as Coca-Cola, Barilla, and Lactalis – a statement directly contradicting the demands of EU sugar beet growers, while Romanian farmers are blocking the borders in protest at the growing Ukrainian agricultural imports.
As the deadline to comply with the EU’s Big Tech rulebook is fast approaching, the competitors of the designated gatekeepers are worried they are nowhere near satisfactory compliance.
Although gas and electricity prices have receded below their 2022 peak, they are not forecast to return to pre-pandemic levels in the foreseeable future, the European Commission said on Monday, warning of the long-term economic consequences of high energy prices on the EU’s competitivenes.
Pro-Russian disinformation in Bulgaria has created a huge division in society and prevents the state from quickly making strategic foreign policy decisions, the leaders of the most influential fact-checking organisations in the country told Euractiv Bulgaria.
Global certification body the ISCC has revised down the extremely high quantities of used cooking oil reportedly collected in Italy and Malta for biofuels production in 2022, saying that the original figures were the result of accounting errors in the submitted data.
Sweden’s government is considering paying pharmaceutical companies to store antibiotics to ensure the availability of older antibiotics in the country.
From 1 January, Poland started enforcing strict regulations on the sale of energy drinks with caffeine or taurine, requiring an ID for their purchase. However, it was not long before the first beverage manufacturers attempted to circumvent the ban.
Last but not least, don’t miss this week’s Transport Brief: Lies, damn lies, and statistics: EU looks to harmonise transport emissions accounting.
Look out for…
- European Parliament’s plenary in Strasbourg Monday-Thursday.
- World Economic Forum Annual Meeting in Davos, Monday-Friday.
- Commission President Ursula von der Leyen meets Italian PM Giorgia Meloni on Wednesday.
- Von der Leyen takes part in Parliament’s plenary debate on Wednesday.
Views are the author’s
[Edited by Zoran Radosavljevic/Nathalie Weatherald]
Source: euractiv.com
