French President Emmanuel Macron is looking to reduce the lead of Marine Le Pen’s party in the campaign for June’s European elections. The formula? Place Russia’s war in Ukraine at the center of the campaign. Blame the nationalist and eurosceptic Le Pen and her European candidate, Jordan Bardella, their historical closeness with the Russian leader Vladimir Putin, their past debts with a Russian bank or the proposal two years ago of a Security Alliance with Moscow. Wielding the defense of French and European aid to the attacked country “without limits” to force the lepenists to define themselves. They don’t have it easy.
At the first European campaign rally of the presidential list, this Saturday in the northern city of Lille, some 4,000 Macronist militants and their main leaders tried to encourage themselves in the face of elections that, for them, are going to be uphill. Bardella’s list scores 10 points or more in most polls. Macron’s candidate, head of the liberal group in the European Parliament, Valérie Hayer, is an unknown. The comeback seems unlikely 100 days before the elections. The miracle, from what was heard in Lille, involves presenting Le Pen’s National Regroupment (RN) and his far-right friends as the more or less recognized agents of Moscow in the European Union.
“Yesterday it was Daladier and Chamberlain, today Le Pen and Orbán,” said candidate Hayer in her speech. It was an allusion to the French and British leaders who in the 1930s made an agreement with Hitler at the Munich conference and ended up emboldening him to invade Europe and commit the greatest crimes of the 20th century. Hayer compared them to Le Pen and Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, the most Putin-friendly of the EU leaders. “The same words, the same arguments, the same debates. We are in Munich in 1938. Yesterday the sleepwalkers, today those who do not want to see, out of convenience or calculation, today Le Pen and Orbán. “It’s one minute to midnight.”
It has been Macron – physically absent in Lille, since as head of state he tends to avoid rallies, but very present with his ideas – who has set the tone of the campaign by hardening the French position towards Russia and in defense of Ukraine. He began on March 26 when, at the end of a conference with Western leaders, he said: “Today there is no consensus to officially, assumedly and decisively send ground forces.” But he added: “Nothing should be excluded.” The statement gave the impression of crossing what, for Western countries, was a red line: the possibility of sending troops to Ukraine. Among the allies, he sowed discord. In France, the opposition accused him of playing with fire.
A different Macron
The Macron of 2024 is the same one who held telephone conversations with Putin for months following the Russian invasion of 2022. It is not the same one who irritated Ukraine – and the EU partners who during the Cold War lived under the Soviet yoke – by proclaiming: “We must not humiliate Russia, so that on the day when the fighting stops we can build a path exit through diplomatic channels. Has changed. Throughout 2023, the president took a progressive turn in his rhetoric and strategy. He intoned a MEA culpa to its partners in central and eastern Europe for France having ignored its warnings regarding Russia in the past. Since the summer, he has defended the need to “provide Ukraine with the means to prevent new aggression.”
The Elysee Palace maintains that Russia has changed its “stance.” More aggressive in Ukraine. More aggressive in Russia, too, with the death in prison of the opponent Alexei Navalni. And in Europe, with disinformation campaigns, alleged plans to interfere in European elections and warnings in some capitals regarding a future Russian attack, beyond Ukraine. All, with the perspective of a possible victory for Donald Trump in the United States that might leave Europeans without the American umbrella. In Prague this week, Macron called on Westerners “not to be cowards.” On Thursday he received opposition leaders at the Elysée and told them that there is “no limit” to French support for Ukraine.
“The time is serious,” Prime Minister Gabriel Attal said in Lille, as if replying to Le Pen and Bardella, who began their campaign a week earlier in Marseille. Le Pen, who has condemned the Russian aggression of 2022, denounced “the warlike postures [de Macron] that have left the French dumbfounded.” And it is true that 68% disagree with Macron’s position when considering sending troops, according to a survey published in Le Figaro. Le Pen added: “France is totally isolated: all capitals, from Berlin to Washington, from Madrid to Stockholm, have firmly rejected this announcement, as resounding as it is unreasonable.” It is not true that France is completely isolated, but, when a debate on Ukraine is held this week in the National Assembly, the leader of the RN will always be able to hide behind the position of Berlin or Madrid to criticize the president’s alleged warmongering.
Geopolitics and electoral campaign. In Lille, the Macronists were not resigned to defeat in June. “We are going to this election to win it,” Pieyre-Alexandre Anglade, campaign director for Valérie Hayer’s list, told EL PAíS. “We refuse to see the extreme right win in the European elections, because they have a project of deconstruction of Europe and submission to Putin’s Russia.” “The war in Ukraine,” he concluded, “defines the future of the European project.”
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