The United States is not the only Western country in which Russia is featuring prominently in electoral politics. For the first time since the end of the Cold War, Russia is also a hot topic in the French presidential campaign, reports Foreign Affairs.
In the lead up to the election in spring 2017, nearly all of the opposition parties—whether on the right, far right, or far left—have bemoaned the degradation of ties with Russia under the government of President François Hollande, arguing that it breaks with France’s tradition of diplomatic engagement and political dialogue with Moscow and that it is detrimental to French economic interests. Some politicians from these parties have also expressed, on international issues such as Ukraine or Syria, views sympathetic to the Kremlin.
The pro-Russian stances of France’s fringe parties do not really come as a surprise: populists in the United States and Europe, from Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump to British politician Nigel Farage or Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban, have voiced their admiration for Russian President Vladimir Putin. The evolution of France’s main conservative party, the Republicans, which is currently leading the presidential race, is more puzzling, however. Some of its key leaders, including former President Nicolas Sarkozy, who in the late 2000s were seen as Atlanticists, now appear more sympathetic to Moscow’s positions than they were before. And this evolution comes at a time when diplomatic relations between Europe and Russia have deteriorated considerably over Russia’s actions in Ukraine. Is it simply electoral posturing and opposition politics, or does it reveal a more profound shift? In any case,the Kremlin has happily fueled the fire through public declarations, sometimes implicitly taking up some of the arguments of France’s right.
The center-left government of Hollande, however, has started to fight back.
It had adopted a firm stance against Russia’s violation of international norms in Ukraine, notably bolstering the EU sanction regime and canceling the delivery of its Mistral warship to Russia while refraining from overly confrontational interactions with Moscow. But the tone between the two countries has significantly ratcheted up over the last few weeks, principally around the heavy bombings by Syrian and Russian air forces over Aleppo, which Paris sees as not only a moral but also a security issue since the bombings risk fueling radicalization and in turn increase the terrorist threat on its own territory.
In early October, after Moscow vetoed a French-sponsored UN resolution calling for an immediate cease-fire in Syria, the French condemned Russia for intensifying its bombing campaign, saying that it amounted to a “war crime” that merited prosecution by the International Criminal Court. In a rather strange setting—an on-the-go interview for a secondary entertainment television channel—Hollande questioned whether he should receive his Russian counterpart, who was planning to visit Paris on October 19 to inaugurate a Russian cultural center on the bank of the Seine. He said that he had found himself “wondering” whether there was any “usefulness or necessity” in receiving Putin and whether a meeting would have any chance of “stopping him from providing support to the [Bashar al-] Assad regime in bombing the civilian populations of Aleppo.” In the end, the Élysée signaled to the Kremlin that their interaction would be strictly limited to a working discussion on Syria and that Hollande would not attend the inauguration event. Putin then abruptly canceled his trip.