Politico: Barnier can’t succeed Juncker if French don’t agree

The pro-European former foreign minister and two-term commissioner belongs to the powerful European People’s Party parliamentary group. He narrowly lost out to Jean-Claude Juncker for its nomination in 2014. This time around, he has a job championing Europe that includes a campaign-style tour of the 27 countries that will choose the next Commission chief. It’s little wonder he’s been widely considered a front-runner for the position when it comes up for grabs in 2019. [...]

To secure the EPP’s nomination, Barnier needs to run as the choice of his French conservative party back home, which is unlikely to happen. And his ascent to the presidency would be nearly impossible without the support of French President Emmanuel Macron. And that’s less than a sure bet. [...]

When asked about his 2019 plans, Barnier says he’s focused on Brexit, but his ambition is an open secret in Brussels. He has the credentials for the job, with two stints in Brussels and four stints as a French Cabinet member. He is lauded throughout Europe for his his so-far successful negotiating tactics and his talent at keeping the EU27 united throughout the Brexit talks. And yet, it will take more than encouragements from Brussels and the rest of the bloc to secure the Commission presidency. [...]

Laurent Wauquiez, the arch-conservative head of Barnier’s French party, Les Républicains, is the deadliest difficulty. The youthful leader of the former moderately conservative party has steered it on a hard-right course, with little patience for anything that looks like European integration. In a 2014 book titled “Europe: Everything must change,” Wauquiez even suggests the EU go back to its six original founding members.

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Politico: France’s conservative ‘bad boy’ ready to take on Macron

He points to his own record in Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes, a region he’s run as a sort of mini-state refusing subsidies for jobseekers and slashing operating costs by 5 percent, as the antithesis of Macron-ism. The president, he argues, is making adjustments around the edges and refusing to take on the elephant in the room: public spending that accounts for 55 percent of the country’s GDP. [...]

Where Macron is moderate on public spending, Wauquiez stakes out a position to the right of Margaret Thatcher. Where Macron preaches eurozone integration, Wauquiez wants a “union of nations.” And where Macron is liberal on social issues, Wauquiez is ultra-conservative. [...]

It’s easy to see why that might be so. In 2005, Wauquiez voted in favor of the treaty that would have established an EU constitution, but he has since positioned himself as a Euroskeptic-lite, and sometimes not so lite. After Britain’s vote to leave the EU, he proposed to abolish the European Commission — a position from which he’s since distanced himself. [...]

The National Front party has long seen Wauquiez as a potential ally, someone who could bring the far right out of its isolation. But Wauquiez rebuffed Le Pen’s proposal to join forces this week, stating he would never enter an alliance with the far right.

Instead, he aims to steal Le Pen voters by echoing her tough talk on immigration, Islam and terrorism — he’s called for throwing all people suspected of being linked to terrorists into jail — with the added appeal that unlike her, he could one day end up in power.

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