Up until a few months ago, few political observers would have predicted that Michel Barnier, the uncharismatic, 70-year-old former chief Brexit negotiator for the European Union, would become a serious contender to stand in next April’s French presidential elections.
Just as few of those who followed those tense negotiations with Britain over its departure from the EU could have imagined that this suave and moderate, publicly mild-mannered champion of European integration, would subsequently propose that France should regain judicial independence from the bloc and adopt a hard line against immigration.
But among the several unexpected turns that have come about this summer in the early build-up to next year’s battle for the Élysée Palace, Barnier is now, according to opinion polling, one of the leading contenders to become the presidential candidate for France’s conservative Les Républicains (LR) party, whose members will later this week choose its nominee.
That choice is between five rivals, among who are three frontrunners: Xavier Bertrand, president of the northern Hauts-de-France regional council, Valérie Pécresse, president of the greater Paris – Île-de-France – regional council, both of them former ministers under the presidency of Nicolas Sarkozy, and Barnier, whose bid caps a political career of almost four decades, beginning as a regional councillor at the age of 22, then a Member of Parliament five years later, before climbing the Gaullist conservative ranks to hold a string of ministerial posts – and two mandates as a European commissioner.
Enlargement : Illustration 1
The LR has remained divided and rudderless since the drubbing it received in the last presidential elections in 2017, when the final round was between Emmanuel Macron and far-right leader Marine Le Pen, and in the ensuing legislative elections, which saw a landslide victory for Macron’s centre-right LREM party. Whoever wins the LR primaries, to be announced on Saturday, faces the uphill task of winning back a section of the conservative electorate lost to Macron (who is yet to announce his widely expected re-election bid), and to disarm the pull upon others among them of the far-right, whose fear-fanning diatribes on Islam and immigration find an echo within the party.
In the runup to the vote this week, the five rivals in the primaries have been presenting their separate programmes to party militants in a series of meetings and TV debates. One of the most crucial of those meetings was held in the Paris suburb of Issy-les-Moulineaux on November 20th, when they faced an audience made up of grass-roots delegates of the party’s national council. It would provide a telling illustration of how Barnier has, during his now three-month campaign, shamelessly abandoned his moderate political persona in favour of the nationalist current of the LR.
Barnier was the first to speak, beginning with an introductory presentation of his programme lasting around 20 minutes, before he gave way to questions from around 500 members of the party’s national council. One woman delegate took the microphone. “When Laurent Wauquiez was president of our party, you called him a ‘populist’. Have you changed your opinion?” she asked Barnier, who, pausing for a moment, fiddling with a notebook, replied: “I don’t know if I said that, but today I wouldn’t say it anymore, because I don’t think that.”
In an interview with BFMTV (in French here) in 2014, when Barnier was European Commissioner for the internal market, he did indeed slam rightwinger Wauquiez, at the time an MP and vice-president of the party (then called the UMP) – who notably argued that the number of EU member states should be cut – for his “populism”, “arrogance” and lack of “seriousness” in his approach to European affairs. But between then and now, Barnier has radically changed his stance. This year, he declared that if he became president, he would appoint Wauquiez, who he said “had been right before others about a certain number of subjects”, as his prime minister.
For Barnier has left behind his former image as a centrist European commissioner. As a revived politician preparing to conquer the Élysée, he must before that win over the majority from among the LR party’s 150,000 members. He believes he has measure of their expectations, and to meet those he has adopted new ideologies and strategies.
By his background, one might have assumed he would represent the moderate Right; for many years he has positioned himself as a conservative who is concerned about environmental issues, who is for European integration, and in favour of regulating the liberal economy. In the LR primaries in 2016, ahead of the presidential and legislative elections in 2017, he supported the similarly-minded Bruno Le Maire, who in the end garnered just 2.4% of the party vote, and who later jumped ship to become Macron’s economy minister.
But that moderate face has gone. Now, Barnier’s public appearances begin with a regular refrain on the subject of immigration and law and order, which he sees as the two priorities. Like his four rivals for the LR’s nomination, he has chosen to ally himself with the ideological hardening of the party’s militant core. Like them also, he views the sound defeat of the old-school and veteran Gaullist conservative Alain Juppé in the 2016 primaries as a lesson to learn from, and, again like them, is pushed further to the Right in the hope of countering Macron’s successful inroads into the LR camp.
In an opinion article published by French daily Le Figaro in July, Barnier caused surprise among his supporters with his proposal for a moratorium on immigration. To put in place his proposals (which include calling a referendum “on the question of immigration", re-introducing the deportation of foreign nationals convicted of serious crimes, and a toughening of the conditions for family members of non-EU foreign nationals already living in France to join them), he also argues for the establishment of what he calls a “constitutional shield”. This is a sort of legal ‘Frexit’, which would untie France from its obligations to comply with the rulings of European judicial institutions, such as by European Court of Justice. This “legal sovereignty”, as he calls it has caused consternation among EU officials, according to a September report by news agency AFP.
But in 2014, when Barnier was eyeing the post of president of the European Commission, he published his programme in a book entitled Se reposer ou être libre (“rest or be free”), he saw things quite differently. “Let’s stop playing on fears, let’s cease with the collective hysteria that surrounds the migratory issue,” he wrote. He attacked those who campaign politically “by shouting louder than the neighbour”, “by being more virulent than the opponent”, “by rejecting the foreigner in the name of the nation”, and denounced those who opt “for a strategy of scapegoats which solves nothing nor leads anywhere”.
“To close our borders, to withdraw within ourselves, would certainly be ‘to sacrifice the future for the present’,” he added in the 2014 essay, borrowing the phrase of the late French socialist statesman Pierre Mendès France. “We have need of immigration to guarantee the perennity of our system of [social] solidarity and the dynamism of our economy,” enthused Barnier, arguing for “a strong and humanist policy towards immigration”, one that espoused European “tradition” and “values”.
At a meeting in November this year in the north-west port town of Brest, where a little less than 100 LR party militants were gathered to hear his campaign programme, he was asked about his change of heart since those words written seven years ago. “The situation has deteriorated,” said Barnier. “The book dates from 2014, there are a million more foreigners since. One must not delude oneself. The country is heading for serious confrontations if we don’t take clear decisions.” That evening, it was LR Member of Parliament (MP) Marc Le Fur, a supporter of Barnier’s bid, who introduced the meeting, during which he referred to the migrant crisis on the Belarus-Poland border. “The migratory wave is at our door,” he said. “Everyone is respectable, but even so, we have to protect our borders.” The assembled audience applauded this, although the local party militants and supporters are traditionally centre-right and far from being the party’s most reactionary.
But in Brest as elsewhere, the rightward drift within the LR is a reality. “The core is moderate, but the electorate is struck by the rise in insecurity and by Salafism,” commented Bernadette Malgorn, a former prefect and local party official. In the corridor leading to the meeting hall, party militants chatted together. One, Josette, said immigrants to France were “fed and housed, those people, from what I’m told”, while Henri-Pierre, a 60-something party member commented: “France doesn’t need softness, but rather a ‘de Gaulle’ who decides once and for all”.
During his presentation, Barnier, unabashed, held forth with his verbiage on immigration and law and order, subjects, he said, which “all the candidates agree to give priority to”, adding, as he has already said in media interviews, that “the French no longer feel at home”. At the end of his talk he was in turn roundly applauded.
However unexpected, Barnier’s ideological U-turn has been a clear strategic success for his campaign. Yet at the beginning of this year, when his close political entourage let it be known that he was preparing to run in the primary elections, the idea prompted ironic smiles from some in the party, while others mocked what they saw as an impossible adventure for the man regarded as a boring technocrat.
No-one now, just days before the party announces its choice of candidate, disbelieves in his very real chances of winning the day. Among MPs, party federations and its youth movement, Barnier appears to be in the lead.
His spokesman, former MP Bernard Carayon, said Barnier was the most popular among party MPs and that “it’s he who has the most federation presidents behind him”, adding: “There are a lot of people in his public meetings, sometimes twice or three-times that of his rivals. That doesn’t tell the whole story, but these are clues.”
Importantly, Barnier’s campaign has the tacit support of the man he once dismissed as a populist, Laurent Wauquiez, the 46-year-old former party leader and now president of the Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes regional council. “I’m not one of those who judged Laurent Wauquiez to be too far to the Right,” commented Barnier, addressing his rivals during the November 20th meeting at Issy-les-Moulineaux. He and Wauquiez have recently met on several occasions. At every opportunity, Barnier adopts the arguments of rightwinger Wauquiez, such as at a meeting in September in the southern town of Nîmes, when he surprised party MPs with talk of the need to crack down on so-called benefits scroungers.
Wauquiez has not publicly announced where his support lies among the candidates, although Barnier’s camp insist his backing is an open secret. But as a result of his lunge to the Right, Barnier has gained a much more precious offering from Wauquiez and his entourage – namely the party apparatus. Not that of the LR leadership at its Paris headquarters, where his rival Xavier Bertrand is well regarded, but that of the party federations around the country and its youth movement, both of which are key for his eventual success.
Barnier’s reassuring persona and his long career in which he has occupied a vast array of senior political posts, give him a clear advantage for a party that otherwise lacks statesmanlike figures. “In his manner of being and talking, he represents quite something in the eyes of our militants,” said party MP and Barnier supporter François Cornut-Gentille. “He is an authentic Gaullist, he oozes humility and coherence.”
Nevertheless, his victory is not a forgone conclusion. Mainly because the numbers of those registered to vote in the primaries has now recently doubled to 150,000, which will mechanically weaken the backing he has inherited through Wauquiez. But also because, to that backdrop, not all the meetings and debates with his rivals have gone in his favour, his dull style being hardly energising, and he appears now to be finishing the campaign less brightly than when he started it.
In response, Barnier, interviewed this month on TV channel CNews underlined that his view of energy is “not agitation”. But above all, he has further hardened his programme. This has included the re-introduction of obligatory military service, and during a visit to France’s Indian Ocean Island of Mayotte, where illegal immigration is an explosive political issue, he announced his intention, if elected, to withdraw the automatic right to French nationality for those born in the country.
In 2014, he argued that on the subject of immigration, it was “irresponsible” for politicians to transform themselves into “simple spokespeople for public exasperations”, adding: “I often tell my teams that our role is to lift the line of the horizon.”
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- The original French version of this article can be found here.
This abridged English version, with some added reporting, by Graham Tearse