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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The Atlantic: Can France's Far-Right Reinvent Itself?

But today, eight months after the French presidential election, the FN seems flummoxed by Emmanuel Macron, the country’s centrist president, who, with his hefty budget cuts and far-reaching welfare reforms, would seem to be the party’s ideal adversary. Instead, the Front’s deputies in the Assembly largely abstained from debates on pro-business labor reform and have kept similarly quiet on tax cuts that benefit the ultra-rich. When voters are asked to identify who they consider to be the primary “opposition” to the government, most pick the left-wing populist La France Insoumise over the FN. Tellingly, it was the fiery Jean-Luc Mélenchon, La France Insoumise’s leader, and not Le Pen, who coined “president of the rich,” a popular epithet for Macron. [...]

Perhaps nothing better exemplifies the FN’s identity crisis than the departure of Florian Philippot, the party’s former vice president and national spokesperson. He had embodied the FN’s “de-demonization” strategy—less racism and xenophobia, more education, healthcare and progressive economics. A graduate of the prestigious École Nationale d’Administration, he joined the FN in 2011, working with Le Pen to refine its critiques of globalization and reframe French politics as a clash between “globalists” and “patriots.” Electoral success followed, thanks largely to low-income voters, many of them from former bastions of the left. In the first round of the 2017 presidential election, Le Pen won more support from working-class voters than any other candidate, according to an Ipsos poll. [...]

On social issues, too, Chenu said the party must evolve: While Le Pen’s 2017 platform called for the repeal of same-sex marriage, “we won’t say we’re against marriage next time,” Chenu said, referring to same-sex marriage. (Shortly after I spoke with Jean Messiha, he landed in hot water: In reference to the party’s former vice president, who is gay, Messiha told Le Monde that “you don’t work with Philippot if you’re not gay.”) “We need to appear like a party that wants to govern France and not just [as] a protest party,” Chenu said. [...]

It’s difficult to see anything changing until another FN politician rises to challenge Le Pen. To some degree, the party still operates as something of a personality cult. (At the national party headquarters, a non-descript building in a residential neighborhood in the Parisian suburb of Nanterre, guests are greeted by intense security checks from armed guards sporting blue patches that read “Marine.”) In a recent opinion poll, she yet again proved herself to be the most disliked politician in France. If the nation isn’t exactly smitten with Emmanuel Macron, it continues to despise Marine Le Pen.

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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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Politico: Where Marine Le Pen goes from here

She also needs to find a new formula that will help the Front avoid extinction in its next two major political battles: municipal and European Parliament elections in 2019, which party troops now see as a historic showdown with Macron’s pro-European form of liberalism. As far as they are concerned, 2019 should be payback time for Le Pen’s heavy loss to Emmanuel Macron in the presidential election this year.

What to expect? Most likely, an abrupt lurch back to traditional National Front messages: anti-immigration, hardline on law and order, and strong on French cultural identity — with much less emphasis on EU-bashing. [...]

First things first: banish Philippot’s name, airbrush his likeness from official portraits, smash any statues devoted to him. In the tradition of the Soviet Union’s Communist Party, the National Front immediately got to work dismantling Philippot’s legacy after he left. “He’s a conceptual guy. He doesn’t go into the field. He lacks human empathy, and that crucial political substance: a feeling for people,” said Jean Messiha, a senior party member and campaign strategist. “He had a fixation on the economic question. He considered that everything had to start with an exit from the eurozone.” [...]

Edouard Ferrand, an MEP, went further on the EU. “We are not an anti-EU party. There are a lot of things to keep about the EU. So we will propose an alternative relationship with the European Union,” he said. Meanwhile, the Front will drill down on the two topics it sees Macron as neglecting: immigration and identity. “We’ll have a political line that’s adapted to the situation of France today. We need to adapt to the circumstances today. If you ask the French what are the main challenges facing the country, they tell you: immigration, Islamism, burkinis. You can make a program out of this question,” said Messiha.

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The Atlantic: The Muslim Feminist Group Scrambling France’s Left-Right Divide

And while one might have expected a feminist leftist organization like France’s Planned Parenthood to oppose a group that includes members accused of being anti-gay marriage and anti-abortion, it actually issued a statement of support for Lallab. When asked about its rationale, Planned Parenthood’s national coordinator Victoria Noseda stressed that the statement was not an endorsement of Lallab or its members, but rather a show of solidarity for a feminist organization. (Lallab later issued a statement declaring itself pro-choice as an organization, notwithstanding the positions of some of its members on the issue.) [...]

Today, the right has defined itself largely with regard to economic and security issues—like labor reform and strong defense. But it has been torn apart from the inside between those who have argued for a strict interpretation of French secularism and those who approach the debate more flexibly. Its mainstream party, the Union for a Popular Movement (UMP), went through an internal crisis in 2015 and was renamed The Republicans, in what was widely seen as a PR move. It’s no longer clear what the right stands for, and it has suffered as a result: During the legislative elections of 2017, the right-wing coalition got its worst score in the history of the Fifth Republic.

The left is also struggling to define what it stands for. Characterized by radical social-justice activism in the 1960s and 70s, the left—except at the fringes—now loosely stands for the ideals of liberalism, that is, emphasizing individual responsibility over government intervention. (With the important caveat that in Europe, in contrast to the United States, a base level of government intervention that might be considered radical in America—including universal health care and strong labor protections—is taken for granted.) But even this modest program doesn’t enjoy the support of all its members. Republican leftists—those who identify with the rigidly secular history of the Fifth Republic—feel at odds with more “radical” leftists, who adhere to a more American approach toward religion and multiculturalism, with its emphasis on freedom of religion. One part of the French left believes that the state should offer protection from religion, and the other, protection of religion. [...]

In fact, the issue of Islam in France is “breaking” the left, according to Benjamin Haddad, a research fellow at the Hudson Institute. This is not just for ideological reasons, but for practical ones as well, he says: Local elected officials have long leveraged identity politics to win elections, but now the strategy is backfiring. Christophe Barbier, a journalist and author of The Final Days of the Left, put it this way: “If the left continues on this path, it will provoke a major ideological confrontation that will precipitate its defeat, because there will always be more people in this country that will react vindictively and aggressively toward immigrants, and especially Muslims, rather than risking a bet on community-building.”

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Vox: 6 things to watch as Macron takes office in France

Macron, who formed a new political party called En Marche in 2016, has promised to strengthen France’s ties to Europe, simplify the tax system, overhaul the labor market, and scale back needless regulations. But without a clear governing coalition, he will face a number of obstacles. If he’s unable to lift France out of its economic malaise, all those festering anxieties will come bubbling up five years from now when the next presidential election is held. [...]

We don't know what will happen or what the mode of failure will be if Macron fails. Who knows, it could empower the far left. Mélenchon [the far-left candidate who quit the Socialist Party in 2008] did better than expected in the first round, so people might turn in that direction. If you were to ask me today, I would say that's the most probable direction in which things would turn if Macron became as unpopular as Hollande.

It's still a deeply divided country, and Macron's vote is by no means an endorsement of Macron's program. Estimates are that as many as 40 or 45 percent of the people who voted for him voted to block Le Pen and not for Macron positively. And he's probably going to alienate quite a number of those people because he said that his first move will be to reform the labor code, which even the mild reforms attempted under Hollande elicited quite a strong reaction and there were demonstrations in the streets, lots of union protests. So the divisiveness is going to come to the fore immediately, and we'll see how he responds to that.

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Politico: French parties’ Macron dilemma: Beat him or join him?

Both the Socialists and the conservative Républicains can’t hide their deep divisions over what to do after their own electoral defeats: Should they join the 39-year-old president-elect — or fight him? [...]

That runs contrary to the official line of the Républicains, who have found a new temporary leader in François Baroin, the mayor of Troyes and briefly an economy minister under Sarkozy. Baroin has been tasked with leading the party’s parliamentary campaign and he is trying to keep it from falling apart. His aim is to secure an absolute majority of seats for the Républicains, force Macron to choose a conservative prime minister — a role Baroin would like for himself — and then try to set their own legislative agenda. [...]

Things aren’t any clearer in the Socialist camp, where the same dilemma is tearing the party apart. Some government members such as junior foreign minister Jean-Marie Le Guen are eager to join Macron — following the example of Defense Minister Jean-Yves Le Drian, one of the new president’s early supporters. And former PM Manuel Valls has called for the party to be squarely in the “presidential majority.” [...]

What will make it harder for conservative bigwigs to decide is that Macron isn’t expected to announce his choice for prime minister until Sunday at the earliest — once he takes over as president. Some Républicains want to make sure that Macron is serious about his intention to govern with people of all stripes. They would be reassured by him choosing a PM from the center-right, as Macron himself hails from the Socialist camp.

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America Magazine: French presidential candidates are breaking tradition by playing the religion card.

Two of the most interesting photo ops of France’s current presidential election campaign took place last month 2,000 miles away in Lebanon—and they were all about religious optics.In one, the far-right leader Marine Le Pen called off a scheduled meeting with Grand Mufti Abdellatif Deriane just outside his Beirut office when the Muslim cleric’s staff insisted she don a headscarf before going in for the meeting. With the video cameras rolling, she emphatically refused. 

Later that day, with the same media entourage in tow, she smiled and exchanged pleasantries with Patriarch Bechara Boutros al-Rai, leader of Lebanon’s Maronite Christians and a cardinal of the Roman Catholic Church. [...]

After several deadly attacks by militant Islamists in recent years and sliding support for the main parties, politicians—especially from the right and far-right—are harking back to a secularized version of France’s traditional Catholic identity as one of several ways to mobilize voters. [...]

But Francois Fillon showed in November that there were still lots of votes to win on the right when he swept the primary of the Republicans—the main conservative party—by openly appealing to traditional Catholics angered by the Socialist government’s legalization of same-sex marriage in 2013.

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Politico: France to sanction ‘misleading’ anti-abortion websites

“Obstruction to abortion” has already been a crime in France, and the new law applies the existing punishment — up to two years in prison and a €30,000 fine — to online activity. [...]

The center-right Les Républicains party has vowed to challenge the law all the way to the Constitutional Council. Lawmaker Christian Kert, speaking on behalf of the party, said just before the vote that the law would threaten freedom of expression and equate to “government censorship.”

France first banned interference with abortion in its penal code back in 1993. Back then, the move aimed to crack down on pro-life “commandos” who stormed hospitals to protest against the abortions being performed. [...]

When you search on Google for the French term for abortion (IVG), the first website listed is the government’s official information portal. But the second website listed, which looks just as professional and even provides a toll-free number to call for advice, is actually managed by activists seeking to talk women out of getting an abortion.

A French comedian recently called that number, purporting to discuss his girlfriend’s abortion plans. “She will have nightmares, anxiety, spams. She will wonder why she needs to smoke a pack of cigs each day and needs to have a glass of whiskey at night,” the veiled activist warned him, in a raucous recording aired on public radio.

The Huffington Post reported last year that the ministry had resorted to paying for better placement on Google so it would come up first, ahead of the unofficial, anti-abortion website.

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Quartz: To defeat Marine Le Pen, France’s center-left must put their nation ahead of party politics

As a result, growing numbers of mainstream liberals are frantically plotting to abandon their radical Socialist wing to block the anti-immigrant, Muslim-bashing, and far more electable Le Pen junior from qualifying for the May ballot. (The French presidential election has two rounds, one on April 23 and the decider on May 7, with the two first-place getters in the first ballot qualifying for the final). Ahead of Sunday, senior Socialist party figures are signaling they will, if required, break away from the hard-left tax and spend candidate Benoit Hamon. Hamon is favored to defeat ex-prime minister Manuel Valls for his party’s nomination but seems unlikely to vanquish Le Pen.

Enter Emmanuel Macron. The 39-year-old independent candidate is a dynamic if relative newcomer to French politics whose centrist, modernizing stance could, according to his backers, unite the moderate left faithful and pull votes away from the embattled center-right. Macron resigned in 2016 as outgoing president Francois Hollande’s economy minister after pushing through landmark labor law reforms. He is running on an economically liberal, pro-Europe platform under the banner of his political grouping, “On the Move.” [...]

Macron already has the friendly ear of former Socialist presidential candidate Segolene Royal. Other sympathizers include supporters of Valls. A group of MPs allied with Valls’s push for the nomination have started circulating a communique to release early next week, paving the way for a mass defection to Macron. Even France’s Green party has signaled it may be willing to join forces. Dany ‘The Red” Cohn-Bendit, co-founder of the ecologist party EELV, said he was ready to vote for Macron because he was “the only candidate” who could avoid the impossible dilemma of a Le Pen-Fillon duel. Cohn-Bendit explained (link in French) Macron’s vertiginous rise in the polls as evidence of “a desire for renewal, new faces, new ideas, new personalities.”

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Al Jazeera: Fillon's victory: A political earthquake in France

The outcome of the Republican primaries revealed a desire among the French people for new faces. Although Fillon started his political career more than 40 years ago, he is ironically considered a newcomer because he was kept in the shadows during the Sarkozy administration. [...]

Fillon's victory is the result of his capacity to create a grassroots movement among The Republicans that supported concrete and radical policy options over the populistic speeches of his former boss, Sarkozy.

It also revealed a determination among Republican sympathisers to elect a candidate who focuses on the party's core values of economic liberalism and social conservatism, rather than on building a bipartisan and moderate platform, as Juppe tried. [...]

On the other hand, Marine Le Pen and the National Front were rooting for the more moderate Alain Juppe to win, allowing the National Front to attract the more conservative Republicans. The choice of Fillon is far less convenient for both Hollande and Le Pen.

In particular, Fillon's strong conservatism is reflected in his ideas on social policies. His Catholic background and hardliner position with regards to same-sex marriage, immigration and - even at times - abortion rights have made him the preferred candidate of a traditionalist and religious electorate that Le Pen was hoping to grab.

On many societal issues, Fillon appeared as a milder, more reasonable version of Le Pen which could be very challenging for her presidential hopes.

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Politico: Why François Fillon’s win is torture for Marine Le Pen

Le Pen was caught off-guard by Fillon’s landslide win Sunday in a contest to pick the center-right presidential candidate. Most senior cadres in her anti-EU group were convinced that Alain Juppé, another former prime minister, would cruise to victory and provide an ideal target for Le Pen in the presidential election next year.

They had planned out their lines of attacks against 71-year-old Juppé, a career politician who could be hounded for his embrace of multiculturalism, his defense of the European Union and his notion that France should embrace a “happy identity” for all. [...]

Fillon has no interest in multiculturalism and wants foreigners to “assimilate.” He also argues that there is a “problem linked to Islam” in France. And while Juppé called immigration a “richness,” Fillon wants to slash it by asking parliament to draw up yearly quotas and making it harder to invoke family reasons for immigrating. [...]

In other words, Le Pen (who last week unveiled her new campaign logo: a rose that looks rather like the Socialist Party’s symbol), is attacking Fillon on his left side. And no one is better suited to the role of left-wing tormenter than Florian Philippot, Le Pen’s powerful vice president and architect of her party’s welfare state-loving, statist, anti-European agenda.

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