Five years ago, during his election campaign meetings, Emmanuel Macron whipped up applause for the cause of the European Union, and today he is keen to underline the fact. “I stood up for Europe when many were booing it, had it jeered,” he said during a press conference on December 9th, when he presented his plans for France’s forthcoming turn, beginning on January 1st, to occupy the revolving, six-month presidency of the European Union (EU) Council.
“I believe that when one defends Europe, one must defend it completely,” he added. “It must be corrected, one must combat its faults, its bureaucratic complexities, sometimes its waywardness, but one cannot say that ‘I like Europe but I don’t like its judicial edifice’.” That remark was aimed at all those, on the Right and Left, as campaigning heats up for France’s presidential elections next April, who have adopted a posture of defiance and disobedience towards the EU’s regulations and the primacy across the bloc of its laws.
That was particularly the case during the recent primaries of the conservative Les Républicains party to choose its presidential candidate, when several of those running argued that France should take back its legal sovereignty in order to enforce harder measures against immigration. One of them was former European commissioner Michel Barnier, the EU’s chief Brexit negotiator, who shocked his former colleagues in Brussels with talk of introducing a “moratorium” and a referendum on immigration, and to do so argued for the creation of what he called a “constitutional shield” which would untie France from its obligations to comply with the rulings of European judicial institutions, such as those of the European Court of Justice.
Barnier, who finally came third in the primaries, is now lending his public support to the winner, Valérie Pécresse. She has declared herself to be “strongly pro-European”, albeit nuanced; in an opinion article published in French daily Le Monde earlier this month, on the same day as Macron’s press conference, Pécresse wrote that “We must from this ‘Europe of naivety’ to build with our partners a ‘Europe of pride’”. She has made clear her intention of including migratory issues, and all that touches on notions of France’s sovereignty in the matter, at the heart of her manifesto for the presidential elections.
Her stance is a traditional one for the Right, and Macron – who has not yet announced his widely forecast re-election bid – has also made immigration a priority subject, dedicating much of his long preamble to his December 9th press conference to the question of the “protection of borders”. Over his five-year term in office, he has significantly hardened his approach to immigration; he who in 2017, in the runup to the elections, spoke of introducing “controlled and humane migratory policies” now regularly insists on the need for “chosen immigration”.
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In an opinion article published in early 2017 by Le Monde, he argued that then German chancellor Angela Merkel, along with German society, had “saved our collective dignity by welcoming refugees in distress”. On August 16th this year, commenting on the situation in Afghanistan as the Taliban took power in the country, he declared that, “We must anticipate, and protect ourselves against, the significant and illegal migratory flows”. Macron, whose 2017 election manifesto did not include the word “immigration”, knows that the subject will play a key part in his chances of an eventual re-election.
“His technique is to approach issues head-on, and immigration is a real issue,” commented Fabienne Keller, a Member of the European Parliament (MEP) for Macron’s LREM party. Her fellow LREM party MEP Stéphane Séjourné, a former advisor to the French presidential office and who is chairman of the liberal centrist Renew Europe group in the European Parliament, argues that, “To profit from the area of freedom that the EU offers, everyone must be clear about the [question of] exterior borders”.
Because Macron and Pécresse will be fighting over a swathe of the same rightwing electorate, a number of their propositions appear similar, whether that be the oft-heard pledge to reform the regulations of the Schengen Area of uncontrolled border passage, and the similarly familiar call for a major plan of aid for development in Africa. Their same strategy towards the Eurosceptic section of the rightwing, while mirroring the far-right by considering that immigration is a key problem, is to set out how the EU can resolve it. “Immigration is growing, that is a reality,” said Macron during an interview broadcast on December 15th on French TV channel TF1. “The answer is not to say that there will be a ‘great replacement’, it is to help the countries of origin and transit, it is to better protect our common exterior borders.”
MEP Stéphane Séjourné insisted that there would be no opportunistic change in the LREM’s fundamental policies in the campaigning for the presidential elections, and the legislative elections that follow soon after. “There will be no break with the principles of 2017, we won’t be reinventing in an artificial manner,” he said. While he recognised that the pro-Macron electorate has evolved over the past five years, he said he believed that it remains “quite homogenous” on issues concerning the EU. “I’m not sure that we’ve been tapping into the conservative sovereigntists on the Right,” he added.
One of Macron’s ministers, speaking on condition his name was withheld, concurred. “In any case, you don’t change your political DNA just like that,” he said. “We’re not going to start bashing Europe in a demographic ploy.”
The longstanding issue of sovereignty was raised again in the context of the Covid-19 pandemic crisis. At its height in France, in March 2020, Macron said he wanted to “rebuild our national and European sovereignty”. While the situation has since evolved further, Séjourné argued that France’s turn to head the presidency of the EU Council has come at a timely moment, and dismissed calls from the opposition for it to be postponed because of the unfair political advantages it offers Macron ahead of next April’s elections, which he said would have been “ridiculous”.
“There is an alignment of the planets,” said Séjourné. “There is an awareness, across the continent, of the necessity for European sovereignty. If we have the opportunity to make progress with certain matters, it is right now.”
Macron’s entourage sees the Covid vaccination rollout as a major card in his talking-up of the role of the EU. Indeed, at his December 9th press conference, he declared: “If we weren’t European, good luck for [getting hold of] the vaccines. I say that just as an illustration. I am proud to be European when I look at the health crisis.”
It is an argument that he will have full opportunity to trumpet over the coming weeks, up until March 12th, as of when the presidency, for reasons of parity in campaigning for the elections in April, is prohibited from further championing its political actions. Notably, on January 19th, Macron will appear before the European Parliament for a speech detailing the programme of France’s presidency of the EU Council – and, between the lines, that of his own.
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- The original French version of this article can be found here.
English version by Graham Tearse