The overwhelming advance of the National Rally (RN) in France, which this Sunday could put the Eurosceptic far right on the verge of power in one of the engines of Europe, is causing cold sweats in Paris, but also in many other European capitals. Because the idea of Europe, or at least that Europe of peace and defence of democracy that arose from the ashes of World War II, is largely at stake in the complex French electoral game.
“There is a lot at stake for Europe, and for the European Union, in these elections: France has significantly shaped the European agenda in recent years, from security and defence to industrial policy and technological regulation,” says Alexandra De Hoop Scheffer, executive vice president of the German Marshall Fund. And the outlook, warns the head of geostrategic policy and risk analysis at the think tank, is not encouraging: “The best scenario would be one in which a lack of French leadership would paralyse progress. The worst scenario would be that the government actively pursues policies that promote the disintegration of the EU from within.”
It is true that the far right is already in power in key European countries, including in founding EU members, such as Giorgia Meloni in Italy or now in the Netherlands, with an executive designed by the ultra-right Geert Wilders. Half a dozen EU members have far-right parties in their executives or rely on them. “What we see in France with Marine Le Pen’s party does not come out of nowhere. It is a gradual, long-term process not only in France, but basically in every EU member state,” recalls Hans Kundnani, visiting professor at the Remarque Institute for Comparative European Studies in New York.
But the rise to power of the far right in France, even though the RN has been gaining strength for years, would be a blow, if not fatal, as President Emmanuel Macron said in April, then deeply painful. Because France is the only country in the EU with nuclear weapons, the only one that sits as a permanent member of the UN Security Council and the economic and political engine of Europe, with a Germany where the ultras of Alternative for Germany (AfD) are also growing.
“France is a systemic country, which is why it is essential for the construction of Europe, and therefore it matters who governs,” explains Arancha González Laya, former foreign minister and current dean of the School of International Affairs at Sciences Po in Paris. Especially since a government of cohabitation with two such different visions, the deep Europeanism of Macron versus the Euroscepticism of the RN (or of the radical left of France Insoumise, although the electoral alliance that it forms together with the other left-wing formations, the New Popular Front, has openly expressed its commitment to the EU), would be a blow to French international leadership.
“It weakens France’s ability to lead in the EU and in international affairs. And this has a very serious impact on an EU that is at a crossroads, where it has to decide how it is going to respond to a world where international relations are becoming brutalized and where the EU is caught in the grip of China on the one hand and the United States on the other. Even more so when in the United States we may be on the verge of Trump returning to the White House,” González Laya points out.
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Russian influence
Leaders such as the Socialist Pedro Sánchez and the German Social Democrat Olaf Scholz have expressed their concern about the arrival of the RN in government. But the advance of the extreme right in France is not only worrying the left. The conservative Polish Prime Minister, Donald Tusk, has also warned of a “dangerous trend” for France and Europe. Especially, he said, because of “information about Russian influence, and of Russian services, in many radical right-wing parties in Europe.”
The Czech Republic and Belgium have denounced the existence of a “pro-Russian interference network” in several European states, especially through far-right groups. The message in X from the Russian Foreign Ministry, just a few days before the second round of elections this Sunday, supporting Marine Le Pen’s party has once again set off alarm bells, even though the RN has tried to publicly distance itself from the Kremlin. Nor does the visit to Moscow of the Hungarian Prime Minister, Viktor Orbán, help, just when his country assumes the rotating presidency of the EU Council. A trip highly criticised by Brussels and other capitals afraid of showing fissures before the Kremlin on Ukraine. Except Paris. Macron has kept a resounding silence. A premature sign, perhaps, of this loss of strength of someone who has raised the European flag like few others?
“Over the past seven years, the French government has significantly shaped the European agenda and promoted integration in many fields,” De Hoop Scheffer stresses. “It has been a strong advocate of making the EU a stronger actor in security and defence and of using its tools to turn it into a geopolitical and geoeconomic player. This impetus has been vital, but would likely be lost under a far-right government.”
In addition to external challenges, the rise of the far right across Europe should lead to collective reflection on the underlying reasons for this phenomenon, which shows no signs of disappearing.
“The EU needs to recalibrate its core agenda to respond to citizens’ daily concerns: economic security, immigration and climate change,” says De Hoop Scheffer. “It needs to take balanced measures that articulate short-term needs and a long-term vision for Europe.”
And it should also seek, adds González Laya, a way to give non-populist responses to the identity-based fears of increasingly mixed societies like the French one, which, justified or not, consider that they are facing a decline in their country. A perception that is exploited by ultra-right movements throughout Europe, linking it to immigration or citizen security.
“We know how to deal with economic inequalities, we know how to deploy social protection shields, we know how to make laws that seek greater and better redistribution. But we have little awareness and little capacity today to respond to these identity issues,” González Laya warns. “And populist forces know how to do this very well, this idea of ‘them and us’, and ‘us and our past that must be restored because it is the only way to return to a greatness that we have lost (…)’ which is the basis of Trumpism.”
And that, the former minister stresses, “is a problem because it is a democracy of rejection, where democracy is no longer capable of mobilizing apathetic people and also of calming angry citizens. What this democracy of rejection is doing is that it is turning these apathetic people into cynics and the angry ones into citizens ready for insurrection. This is our great difficulty and what we have to respond to.”
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