Brexit has helped Europe Help Itself
France Has to Decide Whether to Follow Brexit Britain Into National Weakness and Global Irrelevance
By any standards the 2024 European Parliament election was just another “Move Along Nothing To See” political moment.
Marine Le Pen was already on 30 per cent in opinion polls last December. She did a little better on Sunday with 33 per cent but hardly anyone in France let alone anyone Britain can name one of her MEPs, except maybe the Ganymede 28 year old Jordan Bardella who is her lead MEP.
That’s been the problem with the European Parliament since the first directly elected MEPs arrived in 1979.
All the key decisions affecting Europe are still taken mainly by national governments – EU laws, who gets what job as President of the Commission, Chair of the Council of Prime Ministers, or the Foreign policy “supremo” who is supreme only in carrying out the wishes of national government leaders.
Hence the lowest common denominator problem of the EU. Everyone says the EU “must do x or y” or condemns some decision of Brussels but neither MEPs nor Commissioners can move a centimeter without the green light of elected politicians in EU capitals.
Despite lurid headlines in the monolingual British media which has lost nearly all interest in Europe there was no big shift to the right on Sunday. The 29 parties of the far-right in the two European Parliament groups only won an extra nine seats, one fewer than the centre-right European People’s Party. The EPP is the German-controlled European Parliament main political force which currently has the European Comission President, Ursula Von Der Leyen as its star EU politician.
Some countries moved a bit right, some a bit left, some stayed where they were. The attention would focus on manoeuvring for top EU jobs. There was fury amongst socialist, liberal, Green and other centrist MEPs as Ursula Von Der Leyen – known as VDL - suggesting Giorgia Meloni, Italy’s Mussolini heritage prime minister, should be welcomed into the centre-right family.
Key MEPs from Macron’s Renaissance party exploded with anger at Von Der Leyen’s reach-out to the deeply homophobic Italian rightist whose Brothers of Italy party was founded by former Mussolini aides after 1945. They suggested Mario Draghi, the former president of the European Central Bank, nicknamed “the man who saved the Euro” as a replacement for VDL.
That has now been blown away by the dramatic decision of Emmanuel Macron to dissolve the French Parliament and hole new elections over two rounds on 30 June and 7 July with the British general election in between and the Paris Olympic Games starting at the end of July.
Macron is taking a fascinating gamble. He wants to make the suitability of the far-right in France as a potential government a major national issue. Anyone who heard Marine Le Pen’s father, Jean Marie Le Pen who she still looks after as a 96 year old at her home, speaking in his heyday knows that he is roaring anti-semitic racist who used to denounce in his speeches littered with fake history the name of any Jewish French leader like Leon Blum or Laurent Fabius which he pronounced with a clear anti-Jewish leer.
If he was obsessed with Jews she is obsessed with Muslims no matter how many generations ago their parents arrived in France from what was still French territory like Algeria or Tunisia.
Both Le Pen, papa et fille, hate the European Union. She has had to bring that hate under control thanks to Brexit. When Brexit was voted eight years ago she hung union flags from her windows and decorated her social media pages with praise of the brave Brits who had left Europe.
Now Brexit has turned into an economic and social disaster for the British and devoured 5 prime ministers from David Cameron to Rishi Sunak she and rest of the European nationalist right have cancelled Brexit as a reference point.
In fact, on all policy fronts Le Pen has opinions and desires but no real proposals that can work without leaving the EU.
Macron is hoping that her front-man 28 year old Jordan Bardella who says as little as possible in all debates and never turns up except to collect his expenses at the European Parliament will be exposed in television debates on the 1001 details of domestic policy on which the National Assembly election will turn.
But to defeat Le Pen, Macron needs effective and cooperating political parties. Here he is his own worst enemy. Although he came from the Socialist Party and was appointed a minister by the reformist social democratic president of France Francois Hollande (2012-17), Macron has turned shrply to the neo-liberal Davos right as President. The leftovers of French Gaullism once as big a force as English Conservatives are also broken asunder.
Macron is a post-politics, post-party liberal technocrat. Now he needs party machines to defeat Le Pen but they are not there.
So he may have to live with a Le Pen nominated Prime Minister. He can block most legislation until he has to stand down in 2027. It will be a long a difficult wait for France and the EU will be semi-paralyzed for three years.
Macron has little choice. But no-one now cares much about the European Parliament – and voters never did – as the only story in Europe until 2027 will be whether France ends up being governed by the far right and perhaps expelled from the EU in consequence.