French Right flirts with own version of EU referendum

ComingComing as it did less than a year before France's presidential election, and five months from their own primary to choose a candidate, the French Right was a little disoriented by the British vote to leave the European Union. While not tearing up their existing proposals on Europe – which already anticipated a slimmed-down Europe – the main candidates for the primary this autumn have since been scrambling to win the ear of French eurosceptics by adding a more nationalistic tone to their speeches. Meanwhile Nicolas Sarkozy, president of the right-wing Les Républicains (LR), called an extraordinary meeting of the party's policy bureau on Monday devoted to the issue of Brexit and its likely consequences.

The candidates for the Right's primary had already been talking for some weeks about how Europe needed to be centred around the six founding countries and led by the Franco-German duo. “The favourites are all in agreement on the fact that we have to renegotiate the treaties, correct the current faults and propose something else,” the LR Member of the European Parliament Françoise Grossetête told Mediapart a few weeks before the Brexit vote. In view of the comments made by the primary candidates since the vote, there is a strong chance that this “something else” will be based on two key elements: the nation and protecting Europe's borders.

To no surprise former agriculture minister Bruno Le Maire, the only one of the main LR primary candidates who was already proposing a referendum in his manifesto, was quick to react last Friday as the Brexit vote became known. “Europe can no longer carry on without the people and because the people have been ignored they are taking their revenge,” said Le Maire, himself a former European affairs minister. “We are going to set out a plan, a Europe with borders because a continent that has no border cannot have a political project. Turkey has no place in the European Union, let's say that straight away,” said the MP.

Back in May Le Maire had already warned against “nations disappearing”. He said: “In France we must re-bathe the European project in the bath of national sovereignty to give it back its legitimacy and strength.” Le Maire wants to “close the wound” of 2005 - when the French people voted against a new Constitutional Treaty for Europe, only to see French and EU leaders come up with the Lisbon Treaty which was simply ratified by the French Parliament in 2008 - without going so far as to suggest that France itself quits the EU. Yet with the help of Brexit, Le Maire seems to have forced a change of approach from opponents who up until now have all been opposed to his proposals for a referendum.

In an article in Le Monde the former prime minister and candidate in the primary François Fillon has now proposed a “new Europe created in a new treaty” which “in France would be submitted to a referendum”. However, Fillon ruled out holding a British-style 'in-out' vote. “Those who now demand a referendum comparable to the British one are playing Russian roulette with European civilisation,” he said, referring to calls from the far right.

The frontrunner in the polls for the Right's primary, the mayor of Bordeaux Alain Juppé, was also dismissive of such a vote. “Organising a referendum in France today would be to hand victory on a plate to Madame Le Pen [editor's note, Marine Le Pen is president of the far-right Front National],” warned Juppé. The former prime minister added, however, that “a referendum will be necessary, not just in France but in all the countries concerned, at a certain stage of Europe's reconstruction”.

Nicolas Sarkozy, who has not yet officially declared his candidacy, said: “We mustn't be afraid of the people. If we don't believe in the European idea and it can't bear the test of a referendum it's because we've taken the wrong direction.” However, his idea is that the people should be consulted after his plan for a new European treaty is completed. “Then the question of a referendum will arise and I don't see how one could continue to refuse it. Europe cannot continue to construct itself against the people,” said Sarkozy. It was Sarkozy who, while president, helped get around the earlier 'no' vote in 2005 to the planned Constitutional Treaty by obtaining the Parliamentary ratification of its replacement, the Lisbon Treaty, in 2008.

To interest the primary's electorate in Europe's problems, candidates from the Right want to incorporate some of the euroscepticism that is gaining ground across the continent. Alain Juppé, who up to now had advocated a “resolutely pro-European” campaign, sees the decision by British voters as an “historic shock” but ends by underlining the “lack of love of the people of Europe for Europe, which one can understand”. Juppé thus suggests putting an end to further enlargement - allowing Turkey to join the EU would be to “break [Europe] definitively” he says - to return some functions to state level and to control European borders.

François Fillon maintains that after the Brexit “thunderclap” for Europe, it is the “bureaucratic functioning of the EU which has been condemned”. During the presentation of his manifesto the former premier positioned himself as defending “European civilisation and France's place in that civilisation”. In favour of a “Europe of nations” Fillon mocks a “federal project” of 28 member states which he describes as being “against nature”. In the Le Monde article he states: “Our British friends have sent a message to Europe that it can't afford to ignore - a message from those who no longer want a Europe that leaks like a sieve.” His plan is thus to “build a new Europe that is more respectful of nations”.

Nicolas Sarkozy, who met President François Hollande last weekend in his capacity as head of Les Républicains, has also decided to place the emphasis on nation states which, he said last week, are “our strength”. He added: “There is a European civilisation, a European identity, a European culture, a European way of life that is based on the nation.”

The LR president is calling for a new treaty between now and the end of the year which would focus on the security of the EU's external borders and lead to a Schengen 2 – the original Schengen agreement dates from 1985 and abolished internal border checks - led by interior ministers from the member states. “We can no longer continue not having borders and some borders that are not guarded. We can't continue signalling that the entire population of the world can come to Europe,” Sarkozy told France 2 television last Sunday. “I contend that you can be profoundly European and at the same time an ardent defender of the French nation,” the former president also noted in Le Journal du dimanche newspaper. He ended up laying the responsibility for the existing situation at the door of current European leaders, whose track record he summed up as: “No reform of Schengen, no response on immigration policy, a feeling of impotence faced with the refugee crisis and an impression that European identity and civilisation are not being defended.”

Marine Le Pen wants to be the eurosceptics' champion

Following the Brexit vote the Les Républicains stance on Europe is thus sliding dangerously towards the ideas of the sovereignists and the extreme right who openly rejoice over the British people's vote. It should be noted that several weeks before polling day in Britain the debate there had switched towards the themes of “retaking control” and immigration.

In France, right-winger Nicolas Dupont-Aignan, a candidate for next year's presidential election and leader of the Debout la France ('France Arise') party, swiftly congratulated Nigel Farage, head of Britain's independence party UKIP, who had campaigned for Brexit and against EU workers coming to Britain. “To get the people out of the prison in which the EU has confined us, the only solution is to reduce Europe by returning the control of their borders, their laws, their budget and their money to nations,” Dupont-Aignan said.

The far-right Front National (FN) is also celebrating the Brexit vote. “Victory for freedom! As I've been demanding for years, we must now have the same referendum in France and in EU countries,” the party's president Marine Le Pen declared on Twitter. “Yes, it is possible to leave the European Union,” added Le Pen, who said that the debate on sovereignty was now an issue for everyone.

Marine Le Pen has said that if she is elected to the Elysée in next year's presidential election she will call a referendum, after six months of negotiations with the European Commission, on France's membership of the European Union. A recent opinion poll conducted after the Brexit vote shows that FN supporters are overwhelmingly in favour of this kind of referendum, even though overall 55% of French people do not want such a vote. The FN leader wants to set herself up as the champion of eurosceptics, building on the success, too, of the extreme right in the countries of Eastern Europe. Alain Juppé has dismissed this as a terrible idea, saying the far-right party is going in completely the wrong direction “as there's no future for France outside Europe. Waking up to this was hard for the British and the consequences will be negative and lasting,” warned the mayor of Bordeaux.

The Brexit vote has left the Right's primary candidates wondering how to strike a balance between not overly arousing the anti-European sentiment of their electors while at the same time pandering to their nationalistic attachment. They may all insist that they regret the British decision but that has not stopped them seizing on the vote to launch attacks on the European machine and demand that states regain the upper hand.

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

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English version by Michael Streeter