How Syrian crisis entered the French presidential election

DuringDuring the most difficult periods of his presidency François Hollande has always insisted that he will at least always be given credit for his foreign policy actions. Following the chemical attack in Syria on Tuesday April 4th, the air strikes by the United States that followed and the subsequent reaction from most of the current presidential election candidates, the French head of state looks set to be disappointed even on this.

In a communiqué Hollande and German chancellor Angela Merkel had insisted that “the continued use by [Bashar al] Assad of chemical weapons and mass crimes cannot stay unpunished”. But in the middle of the French presidential campaign just two candidates, the Socialist Party's Benoît Hamon and, more cautiously, independent Emmanuel Macron, defended the American cruise missile strikes that took place in the early hours of Friday April 7th. All the other presidential contenders were far more critical, both of the American attack and, by implication, of current French foreign policy.

Hamon was the most enthusiastic supporter of the American riposte. “It's our duty to react faced with extreme barbarity,” he said in a statement on Friday, which noted that he had always refused to distinguish between atrocities based on who committed them. “Daesh [editor's note, Islamic State] and Bashar al-Assad are barbarians. The Trump administration showed last night that there was a price to pay in crossing certain lines. Bashar al-Assad is directly responsible for the American strikes.” It was the argument used by both Hollande and Merkel.

Speaking later on a visit to Nièvre département or county in central France, Hamon added: “I hope this will lead those who find every excuse for Mr Putin to revise their judgement today when the only reaction to Mr Putin is to condemn the undermining of Syria's territorial integrity.” It was a clear rebuke to those candidates in the election, including the far-right Marine Le Pen, but also right-winger François Fillon, who are broadly supportive of Putin's Russia.

Hamon has supported all France's military interventions since Hollande came to power in 2012. He continues to believe that the essential requirement for a solution in Syria is the removal of Assad and he supports the foreign policy conducted under Hollande's presidency. He has stepped up his criticism of Vladimir Putin and is against France resuming its diplomatic representation in Damascus. Hamon was also the first of the candidates to raise the issue of the chemical attack on April 4th and was quick to say that the attack was “clearly” carried out by the Assad regime.

As has been his habit, the centrist candidate and former economy minister Emmanuel Macron was more cautious in his reaction to the air strikes. Just before they took place he had told public broadcaster France 2 that he was favourable to a military intervention under the authority of the United Nations, describing Assad as a “criminal” whose actions needed to be “punished”. On Friday, after the unilateral US attack, Macron merely said that he “took note of the American intervention”. On a visit to Corsica he then repeated what he had said the previous day: “My desire is for there to be coordinated action at an international level as a reprisal against Bashar al-Assad's regime and the crimes which have been committed.”

Unlike Hamon, Macron has prioritised issues in relation to Syria and has not called for Assad's removal as a necessary condition for a solution. On Wednesday April 5th, before the American air strikes but after the chemical attack, Macron stated: “I have one priority: to eradicate Islamic terrorism which is a threat to our country, which has already struck and which killed our children several months ago.” He added: “Our enemy is Daesh [Islamic State] and all the jihadist groups who incite attacks and threaten us. Bashar al-Assad is the enemy of the Syrian people and he must answer for his crimes in front of international courts, we'll be on top of that, without compromise, but we will order the priorities and battles.”

Macron says he also favours “constructing peace” rather than intervening “on one side or another”, though he did not question France's current military involvement in Iraq and Syria. In reality his line is broadly similar to that of the Elysée and the French Foreign Ministry, who have themselves stopped calling explicitly for Assad's removal as a condition for political transition in that country.

However, it is a different picture with the other nine candidates in the French presidential election, who are all critical of Hollande's foreign policy and, to varying degrees, of the American air strike in Syria. In some cases there have even been some unexpected agreements between opposing candidates: for example, the right-wing candidate François Fillon and the radical left candidate Jean-Luc Mélenchon have similar policies on the Russian occupation of the Crimea, albeit for different motivations.

On Friday the Les Républicains candidate Fillon described the US air strikes as “understandable but dangerous”. The risk, he said, was that they took the Syrian conflict to a new level which could escalate into “widespread conflict”. He added: “With the experience of Iraq, everyone should reflect on the consequences of a Western intervention in the Middle East. It's the time for France to make its voice heard. Not to follow blindly Washington's policy, which is, incidentally, changing.”

'It's up to the Syrians to decide the future of their country'

Instead, Fillon told France Inter that efforts were needed to avoid a direct conflict between the United States and Russia on Syrian soil. “If Western intervention is not the right solution … then other than standing by helplessly as has been the case for six years, the other solution involves talking to the Russians, the Iranians and the Turks and to try to find a formula to remove Bashar al-Assad and organise the transition,” said Fillon, who has never hidden his closeness to Russia's Vladimir Putin.

Jean-Luc Mélenchon, the radical left candidate who has been rising up the opinion polls in recent weeks, has always denied suggestions that he is close to the Russian leader and says that were he a politician in Russia he would be in the opposition. But his team were quick to condemn the American bombing in Syria as “cowboy diplomacy”. Mélenchon's spokesman Alex Cobière told Radio Classique: “This violence only perpetuates violence with the people underneath getting bombed on. It solves nothing,” he said, calling for the UN to be involved. The French Communist Party (PCF), which is supporting Mélenchon's candidacy, said it a statement: “The unilateral North America military initiative creates a precedent with the worst possible consequences: the rejection of the multilateral framework that is the United Nations to resolve the Syrian conflict is full of dangers for the world and represents a real backwards step.”

Mélenchon has so far refused to blame the Assad regime for the chemical attack. Instead, during last week's television debate between the candidates he defended the last UN Security Council resolution which, he said, declared that “it's up to the Syrians to decide the future of their country … there will be elections in Syria and it's they who will decide”. It is not the first time that he has called for an election when asked about what should happen to Assad.

The main aspect of Middle Eastern policy where Mélenchon differs from François Fillon is over his insistence that a scramble for raw materials lies behind the Syrian crisis. “What's at stake in the front line that we're dealing with, in Syria and Iraq, are the gas and oil pipelines. If the debate is open and if we get around the table all the players in this contest then we can dampen down this hotbed of war,” he says. Jean-Luc Mélenchon has also called for those who have been “accomplices” of terror groups to be punished, for example the Franco-Swiss construction company Lafarge suspected of having worked with Islamic State between 2012 and 2014 to protect a cement works in Syria. “This company should be either requisitioned or confiscated - an example should be made of those who conspire with the enemy,” he says.

However, Mélenchon's stance on Syria is not universally supported on the radical left, even among his own supporters. The group Ensemble put out a statement condemning what it called a “new war crime” committed by the Assad regime.

The two candidates from the far left, Philippe Poutou and Nathalie Arthaud, defend similar positions, in line with the internationalism and anti-imperialist stance of their politics, and which could be summed up by the slogan: “Neither Assad nor Daesh.”

Reacting to the US air strikes, Poutou, from the anti-capitalist Nouveau Parti Anticapitaliste, said he felt “disgust” at the intervention. “Barely a week ago the [Trump team] built on their earlier positions by indicating that an agreement with Bashar al-Assad was envisaged in the context of the 'war against terrorism' … These signals have clearly been interpreted by the Syrian regime as an encouragement to continue with its depraved actions and, after Obama, Trump thus has a share of the responsibility for this appalling chemical attack,” he said.

Poutou has also made it clear he will not join in with those whom he feels have been too lax towards the Syrian regime. “Without lending the slightest support or expectation to the American military strikes, we don't join in with those protests by parties in France who, in order to seek a 'reasonable' peace with Assad and his henchmen, close their eyes to the hundreds of thousands killed by the dictator and the millions who have been displaced and made refugees,” he said.

Nathalie Arthaud, the candidate for the workers' party Lutte Ouvrière, said that she did not think that American bombs would stop this “terrible” war from continuing. “It won't put an end to the Syrian regime,” she said. “Like the regime's bombs they are state terrorism, which in turn feeds the terrorism of the Islamist groups. This bombing is part of a long list of imperialist crimes in this region, a region which the great powers have pillaged and ravaged for more than a century.”

Assad supporters

Some other candidates are clearly supporters of Bashar al-Assad. That is evidently the case with the far-right Front National candidate Marine Le Pen, who on a trip to the Lebanon in February made clear her views, linking them to the fight against Islamic State. “I've said clearly that, in the context of the least-worst policy, which is a realistic policy, that Bashar al-Assad was obviously today a much more reassuring solution than Islamic State, if the latter were to come to power in Syria as it did in part in Libya after the disappearance of Gaddafi,” Le Pen said at the time. “It seems to me that there is no viable and plausible solution outside the binary choice between Bashar al-Assad on the one side and Islamic State on the other.”

Le Pen, who is close to Russia and to Putin, and whose party has been financed by loans from Russian banks, was unsurprisingly critical of the US air strikes. “I'm a little surprised because Trump had indicated several times that he no longer intended the United States to be the world's gendarme and that's exactly what he did yesterday,” she said on Friday. “What I wanted was that we didn't have the same scenario as we saw in Iraq and Libya which are in reality processes which have caused chaos, which have ended up helping Islamic fundamentalism and terrorist groups who, as a result, have taken advantage of this strengthening to come and hit us on our own soil.”

Sovereigntist candidate Nicolas Dupont-Aignan says he is in “complete agreement” with François Fillon's vision of foreign policy. Last December he called for the Syrian president to be “strengthened” in his position as he was the “only legitimate president in Syria”. Dupont-Aignan then made a reference to World War II: “Faced with Hitler, would you have rejected Stalin?” In common with others who have pro-Assad sympathies, his obsession is the fight against Islamic State. “It wasn't Bashar al-Assad or Putin who killed 230 people on the pavements of Paris,” he said in reference to recent terror attacks in France. He has also suggested that the “250 jihadists” who have returned to France from Syria should be sent to the remote Kerguelen Islands in the southern Indian Ocean – they are also known as the Desolation Islands.

During last Tuesday's televised debate another of the candidates, centre-right Member of Parliament Jean Lassalle, who has twice been to Damascus and who met Assad on one of those occasions, called for France to re-establish diplomatic links with the Syrian regime. Speaking on Wednesday to Europe 1 radio, Lassalle refused to condemn the Syrian chemical gas attack. “I'm not a judge at The Hague, I'm an MP,” he declared, before questioning some of the witness accounts of the attack. “I've seen so many things in my life. I saw a completely unexpected atrocity in Romania, it was called Timisoara [editor's note, he is referring to the shooting of protesters there in 1989 at the start of that country's overthrow of communism]. I wanted to throw up. And afterwards I learnt that it was a grim deception by the KGB [editor's note, this is one thesis behind some of the events of 1989, even if there is little or no evidence to support it].” The MP said he had “doubts” about the way Syria in general is depicted.

This line is taken, too, by two other candidates, sovereigntist François Asselineau and Jacques Cheminade, who defines himself as a “left-wing Gaullist”. Both attack what they see as the international community's “lies” over Syria. Last December Asselineau, talking about the fall of Aleppo in Syria, spoke of the “version [of events] that had been imposed on the Western people... whose lies now stare you in the face”. Back in 2013 he had already attacked the official version of events over the chemical attack at Ghouta in Syria. “Where do you get this information? Do you think that the news that we get from the mainstream French media is trustworthy on these issues?” he asked. When a journalist described Assad as a “butcher”, Asselineau replied: “That's what you say! Because he who only listens to one story only gets one version ...”

Jacques Cheminade has also attacked media coverage of the Syrian crisis. “This is the same media that told us that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction,” he said in December 2016. He believes that the Syrian crisis was provoked by Western powers to “punish” Assad whose efforts to “modernise” the country had led to the emergence of a middle class, and who had rejected all “gas and oil pipeline” plans. “That couldn't be tolerated. When a middle class appears that's a 'no' from the point of view of the Atlanticist system, of the City and Wall Street,” said the candidate for the French presidency, without however producing any evidence for this. “We live in a world of smokescreens,” he added.

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• The French version of this article can be found here.

English version by Michael Streeter