Macron rattled as EU election defeat looms

PARIS  — French President Emmanuel Macron is turning up the heat on his lieutenants ahead of the European election as the far-right National Rally continues to build on its seemingly unstoppable momentum.

Macron’s game plan ahead of the EU election for tackling the Rally’s unrelenting rise was to dramatize the fight against the far right National Rally, emphasizing the clash of ideologies and the Russian threat, according to several French officials. The twin aim was to beat abstention and mobilize Macron’s own voters, and also dissuade voters from turning to rival pro-European candidates such as the Socialist Raphaël Glucksmann and the ecologists.

But several weeks into the campaign, the strategy has failed to deliver, according to recent polls, and alarm bells are starting to ring. A recent study by IFOP put the far right, led by National Rally President Jordan Bardella at 30 percent of the vote against 21 percent for Macron’s coalition, with their rival on the left Glucksmann polling at 11 percent.

Six months ago, Macron’s Renew coalition was trailing the far right by five percent, according to aggregated polls.

With plummeting popularity ratings and a soaring public deficit, Macron and his party have an uphill battle to claw back support. And their answer to the National Rally’s relentless rise is to punch back hard.

This month, the lead candidate of Macron’s Renaissance party Valérie Hayer compared the far-right leader Marine Le Pen with Edouard Daladier, the pre-war French PM who signed the 1938 Munich agreement with Hitler. “It’s the same words, the same arguments, the same debates. We are in Munich in 1938”, she said.

“In some of its behaviors, the National Rally acts as a spokesperson for Moscow,” said Renew MEP Marie-Pierre Vedrenne, doubling down on the anti-RN rhetoric. “If we’d have listened to the National Rally, we’d have Frexit, Sputnik vaccines and we’d have supported Russia” against Ukraine, she continued.

Meanwhile, the French president has been upping the anti-Russia rhetoric on the international scene, with hawkish comments about not ruling out western troops in Ukraine, and the need for Europe not to be “cowards.”

Upping the pressure

Privately, Macron has turned his frustration with the campaign on his allies. Last Wednesday, he gathered several party heavyweights at the Elysée Palace, including Foreign Affairs Minister Stéphane Séjourné and campaign director Pieyre-Alexandre Anglade.

According to two participants at the meeting, the president called on his troops to better defend the track record of Renew MEPs. “We need a wake-up call for our troops, we need to mobilise a lot more,” the president said, according to one of the participants who was granted anonymity to discuss a sensitive issue.

“Right now, there is more commentary than mobilization, I would like that to change,” he added according to that same participants.

This is not the first time that the president has made his displeasure known. During the COVID pandemic, the French president reprimanded his teams over the slowness of the vaccination campaign in France, with the effect of accelerating the campaign, but also distancing himself from the shortcomings of his administration.

With less than three months to go before the election, Macron’s alliance of centrist parties in France hasn’t quite found its stride in the campaign, said a person with knowledge of the campaign, who like others quoted here, was granted anonymity to discuss a sensitive topic. “The coalition struggles to find its place in a campaign where none of the [national] MPs are running, where there are no constituencies to fight for,” he said. “MPs and ministers aren’t yet at 100 percent in the campaign. “

But some allies have also expressed doubts publicly and privately about the president’s strategy of dramatizing the ideological fight with the far right.

Francois Bayrou, a French centrist and one of Macron’s earliest supporters, has said that the far right shouldn’t be “the only topic of the campaign” adding that it was “a gift” to focus so much attention on the National Rally

One MP belonging to Macron’s Renaissance party, said targeting the National Rally “helps rally” voters, but he was more in favor of a “50/50” approach that also focused on other issues. “We need to insist on our European credibility and send press the idea that we succeeded on many issues” such as the CAP, Frontex and the Green deal, he said.

That message has partially been heard, with a second phase of the campaign expected in April, with new proposals.

Double-edged sword

Some have heard Macron’s message loud and clear. This weekend, Prime Minister Gabriel Attal, who remains popular, was out handing out leaflets with Renaissance’s little-known lead candidate Valérie Hayer.

Macron himself is starting to hit the campaign trail. Last week, he was in the port city of Marseille, ambling in a working class district to sell his track record on fighting inner-city crime and drugs gangs. The French president also went to great lengths to end a rebellion by French farmers, killing off the Mercosur trade deal and lobbying for greater restrictions on Ukrainian food imports.

In January, Macron’s party laboriously pushed through an immigration bill, which has accelerated the removal of failed asylum seekers and tightened welfare benefits for foreigners. In the process, the French president risked splitting his coalition, to pass a bill meant to showcase his increasingly hard line on illegal immigration, and siphon away voters from the right and the far right.

Many inside Macron’s camp also hope the widening gap between the National Rally and the centrist will start to close as election day approaches. “The National Rally is high. But I know they have been overestimated in the past, there is a craze of saying ‘I’m going to vote for Bardella’ but are people really going to ?” asked Renew MEP Gilles Boyer.

According to OpinionWay pollster Bruno Jeanbart, the real test for the centrists will be when Macron really enters the campaign, most likely in the last weeks before the elections.

“He is the only one who can mobilize, the party can’t mobilize. Each time Macron has entered the campaign, it has had an impact,” said Jeanbart.

But while Macron has a galvanizing effect on his voters, he also has a repellent effect. “He has a paradoxical impact, he is able to mobilize, but at the same time he makes arguments for people to vote against him, in favor of Bardella,” he said.

Anthony Lattier contributed reporting.