The British people go to the polls this Thursday, June 23rd, and if they vote to leave the European Union – the so-called 'Brexit' option – this would represent a major setback for other European leaders, and in particular François Hollande. The French president has already pledged that he will take steps to relaunch the European project once the British referendum is over, whatever the outcome. But just as in Britain all French political parties, on the Left as well as on the Right, are divided on the issue, struggling to find a response to the growing exasperation that people feel towards the EU.
At the Elysée François Hollande is already consulting on all sides in preparation for the aftermath of the British vote. Two ministerial meetings on the issue have been held in recent weeks. The French president has spoken about the subject with Angela Merkel on several occasions and discussed it with Italian prime minister Matteo Renzi in a phone call last weekend. “We're working on both scenarios, yes and no, to measure the economic consequences,” says an official in the French president's entourage. “In case of Brexit we need to prepare the necessary shock absorbers.”
In Paris officials are quick to point out that it is primarily the role of the European Central Bank (ECB) to calm the financial markets if there is financial turbulence. “We think that the European economy will withstand the shock. But we have to be vigilant and be prepared to intervene. In particular through the [Eurozone's] European Stability Mechanism,” say officials at the Elysée, where the main concern is for the potential impact on the balance sheet of French banks. If Britain does vote to leave the EU then Hollande will “very quickly” launch a series of consultations with the main French political parties and made a public declaration on Friday. Another ministerial meeting might also be held at the Elysée.
For France's Socialist Party, which has made the construction of a European project a key plank of its ideology, Britain's departure would be a political setback. It would also signal the failure of the current leaders, in particular François Hollande, who has pronounced in favour of a 'Remain' vote on several occasions, going as far as threatening reprisals against xenophobic advocates of quitting the EU. In recent weeks he has repeated that there will be “consequences if the United Kingdom leaves the European Union”, on the single market and on financial services but also on “the way of managing the situation in relation to migration”. Then, speaking on Wednesday, the day before polling, the French president said that more than Britain's future in the EU was hanging in the balance. “The departure of a country that is, geographically, historically, politically in the European Union would have extremely serious consequences,” he said. “It would also have extremely serious consequences for them, too.”
Hollande's economy minister Emmanuel Macron has spelled things out even more clearly: in an interview with the Financial Times in March he warned that in the event of Brexit the migrant problem currently seen in Calais would switch to Britain. “The day this relationship unravels, migrants will no longer be in Calais,” he said, implying that France would no longer prevent migrants wanting to travel to Britain. He also said that France would welcome with open arms British bankers who fled the City. Brexit, he said, would “signal the the Guernseyfication of the UK, which would then be a little country on the world scale. It would isolate itself and become a trading post and arbitration place at Europe's border”, he later told Le Monde.
But whatever the outcome of Thursday's vote, the French president has promised new “initiatives” to relaunch the European project, to avoid the anti-EU contagion spreading to other countries, such as Hungary and Poland, and to contain the progress made by the extreme right everywhere on the continent, including in France. “All populists, in all of Europe, are going to ask for referendums and push for an exit,” says Henri Weber, a former socialist member of the European Parliament. “It's just down to us to ensure they remain a minority.”
Francois Hollande has already explained that he wants a “Parliament for the Eurozone, in the framework of the European Parliament, which could have a supervisory power, its own budget for the Eurozone, which could finance investments in the general interest, new advancements in digital issues, in relation to energy transition and, for the countries who wanted it, a Europe of defence”. During a speech on May 3rd at a meeting organised by the Fondation Jean-Jaurès, Hollande said: “France has been prepared for it for a long time, Europe must now be convinced of it, so I will put forward proposals following the vote by the British people.”
“We're working on a political initiative with Germany, the founding countries, to get out of the cycle of crisis which confronts the European Union,” insists an ally of François Hollande. Of which “foreign policy, defence and control of refugees” will be the priorities. “We must get back to basics,” says the same source, who recalls the failure of the European Defence Community at the start of the 1950s, an idea ultimately rejected by France; both the communists and the supporters of Charles de Gaulle opposed it in Parliament and the project was abandoned. “Economic questions are not today at the heart of the issue,” say officials at the Elysée. “The question is how to ensure that the states don't retreat back in on themselves, because they have the feeling they're being invaded [editor's note, by migrants].”
The chances of success for such an initiative, which once again is addressed more at conservative groups than the Left, is very slim. The French presidential election takes place in a year and François Hollande will not engage in a shake-up of the EU before that campaign, particularly given his level of unpopularity. “The president's problem is that he's inaudible,” admits his Socialist Party colleague Henri Weber. “He's said a lot of things about Europe since 2012 but who's listening to him?”
Moreover, his own camp is divided, between those who insist stronger integration and new massive transfers of sovereignty are the only way, and the more cautious who want to preserve the primacy of the heads of state and government. What is more, a Europe with its own defence capability will be hard to bring about without Great Britain which, along with France, is the main country able to deploy its armed forces beyond its borders.
'It's the beginning of the end'
The European debate affects the Right, which is under even greater pressure from the far-right Front National which wants a referendum on leaving the EU, just as much as François Hollande's Socialist Party. With the main right-wing opposition party Les Républicains gearing up for its autumn primary to choose a presidential candidate, the main hopefuls share the view of the party's president Nicolas Sarkozy about the dangers of migration, before for the most part restricting themselves to some hypothetical reconstruction of the European project.
But the British vote is also affecting other parts of the Left too, not just the Socialist Party. Even the greens in the Europe Écologie-Les Verts (EELV) environmental alliance find it harder than before to praise the merits of the European project. They are, of course, opposed to Brexit. “The departure of Great Britain would create an extremely damaging precedent about Europe's direction,” says the EELV Euro MP Yannick Jadot. In his view “the worst [scenario] would be that Great Britain leaves and the euro-slackers who govern us give them want they want”.
Like his colleagues, the MEP is very angry with François Hollande for having given up on reforming the Treaty on Stability, Coordination and Governance (TSCG) in 2012. “For four years now François Hollande has been saying the same things on Europe, without anything being started or brought to fruition. Rather than confront Angela Merkel in the European Council, he prefers to deal directly with her over some [points of] flexibility so that [France] need not respect the framework that he has allowed to be imposed on him,” says Jadot. But Jadot, a long-time supporter of the idea that all 28 member of the EU move forward slowly together, the so-called 'small steps' approach that has built the union this far, is now convinced that Europe has to develop at different speeds. This is the idea of an EU of different circles or “concentric circles” defended by the late French president François Mitterrand and now Hollande.
Enlargement : Illustration 1
“Brexit is the symptom of a process of the internal fragmentation of the social and political fabric that nothing seems able to stop. Political movements today don't yet know how to get out of it,” explains Alain Coulombel, who was recently elected as the EELV's deputy national secretary. This explains, he says the “wait-and-see attitude, remoteness, fear” on show in the face of a potential exit by Great Britain. “Today great lyrical discourses on the European project aren't enough to give it meaning. We're no longer managing to express the complexity, not even we greens,” he says.
The radical left in France is scarcely more excited by events. On paper the UK referendum, which was preceded by a spectacular round of renegotiations from British prime minister David Cameron in Brussels, paves the way for all those who still back the “no” vote given against plans for an EU Constitutional Treaty in 2005. After the French people voted against this treaty it was replaced by the Lisbon Treaty instead. The problem is that in the case of Britain most of the people wanting to leave the EU are ultra-liberal economically and/or anti-migrants, and people advocating 'Lexit' – a left-wing version of leaving the EU – are in a very small minority.
Like the Socialist Party and the EELV, the French communist party the PCF is also opposed to Brexit. “We're very critical of the European construction but in the British context the [referendum] question posed leaves no room at all for a debate on policy alternatives to austerity,” explains the PCF's Anne Sabourin, who is also part of the pan-European Parti de la Gauche Européenne or European Left. “If 'Remain' wins, that will not be an indictment of the way Europe is now. And if 'Leave' wins, the forces of the Right and extreme right will emerge strengthened.” Sabourin, who is in charge of European issues for the PCF, considers the British referendum to be a “trap for the working classes and for the Left”. But she admits that to get out of the impasse “we need to have some wins” - the “we” referring to the progressive left.
As for Jean-Luc Mélenchon's radical left Parti de Gauche, it is calling neither for Britain to leave nor to remain in the EU. Mélenchon, a presidential candidate in 2012 and who is planning to stand in 2017 too, has in his tone at least been much more critical of Brussels and Berlin than his former communist partners, and sees the British referendum as a new argument for his 'Plan B'. “When you do not allow tax and social harmonisation and you impose the straitjacket of a single currency, the people are condemned to enter into competition. This mad dynamic has killed Europe. Brexit is going to be a defining moment. It's the beginning of the end. That gives us a chance to construct things differently,” Mélenchon recently told L'Obs magazine.
“Unlike the Left's 'no', which was in the majority in 2005, exit from the Union has been appropriated by the British Right,” says Danielle Simonnet, who is a councillor in Paris and close to Mélenchon. “Everything depends on who poses the question and how: there it's being presented as the choice between German ordoliberalism and English ultra-liberalism”. But the Parti de Gauche councillor adds that “in its method, it shows that there is a logic in adopting a head-on power struggle and that it's possible to negotiate”. Moreover, says Simonnet, even if the framing of the British referendum debate is not suited to the Left “that does not exonerate the European Union from its anti-democratic nature and doesn't invalidate the appropriateness of a referendum”.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------
- The French version of this article can be found here.
English version by Michael Streeter