Marine Le Pen’s Rassemblement National is a known quality, but people are beginning to wake up to the nature of the main opposition it seems to be facing.
The story of the snap parliamentary elections called by President Macron in the wake of his party’s humiliation at the hands of Marine Le Pen’s Rassemblement National (National Rally) in the EU elections has primarily revolved around the possibility that the RN might be France’s next government (the first round of voting will be on June 30, the second July 7).
The RN is a known quality, but people are beginning to wake up to the nature of the main opposition it seems to be facing, a coalition calling itself the Nouveau Front Populaire (New Popular Front), a name that deliberately evokes Leon Blum’s groundbreaking Popular Front government of 1936-37, a left-wing coalition formed to fight against the rise of far-right and fascist groups.
Who are the NFP? Over on UnHerd Anne-Elisabeth Moutet explains that the NFP:
brings together people who have weekly chanted “From the River to The Sea” (and sometimes “Death to Jews”), with that rump of the old-style Socialist Party that lit up the Paris City Hall and the Eiffel Tower with the Israeli flag after 7 October. Raphaël Glucksmann, son of Nouveau Philosophe André, whose Place Publique mini-party had pulled his Socialist associates out of near-extinction to poll 14.8%, five points above the hard-Left Mélenchonista faction and a mere half-point from the Macron list on the promise that he was offering a social democrat alternative to the extremes, swallowed his principles and agreed to join the NPF.
The reference to Mélenchonista is to La France Insoumise (France Unbowed), the party formed some years ago by Jean-Luc Mélenchon, a politician of the populist far left, who has made too many remarks that could be plausibly interpreted as antisemitic for there to be any serious doubt where he stands.
As Moutet observes, the NFP has come up with an economic program more radical even than the one put in place by the newly elected François Mitterrand and his Communist allies in 1981 (the U-turn followed two years later).
Moutet:
It includes nationalising utilities, cancelling pensions reform (bringing back retirement at 60), the return of the wealth tax, increasing inheritance tax (which already reaches 45% above £1.5m for direct descendants, and above £22,000 for everyone else), a cap on maximum inheritance (this is part of a chapter headlined “Abolishing the privileges of billionaires”), a “distance tax” on imports, an exit tax (to anyone leaving the country), and many, many, many more taxes.
And there’s more, from additional greenery to a promise to repeal the (slightly) tougher immigration law signed by Macron earlier this year. Macron’s party has put a price of €357 billion on the NFP’s plans. Even allowing for its bias, that’s a lot more than the €100 billion price tag that a center-right think tank reckons comes with the RN’s program.
The latest polls show the NFP on 28 percent, the RN on 33 percent. The center is not holding.
In the Spectator, John Keiger, writing on June 16:
This past week, the French Bourse has dropped 6.2 per cent, the premium France pays on her debt compared to Germany, the ‘spread’, saw its biggest weekly rise since the 2011 eurozone debt crisis. Last week, Le Monde detailed how France’s small and large business communities were more fearful of the NPF than the RN.
The Financial Times (June 17):
France’s corporate bosses are racing to build contacts with Marine Le Pen’s far right after recoiling from the radical tax-and-spend agenda of the rival leftwing alliance. . . .
Four senior executives and bankers told the Financial Times that the left — which polls suggest is the strongest bloc vying with Le Pen — would be even worse for business than the Rassemblement National’s unfunded tax cuts and anti-immigration policies.
“The RN’s economic policies are more of a blank slate that business thinks they can help push in the right direction,” a Cac 40 corporate leader said of Le Pen’s party, which is ahead of other groupings in the run-up to the two-round vote on June 30 and July 7. “The left is not likely to water down its hardline anti-capitalist agenda.”
In the Daily Telegraph, Matthew Lynn has been watching the rise in French interest rates, which is not helpful given France’s 5 percent budget deficit and a debt/GDP ratio of 112 percent. The latter number puts France third behind the U.S. (if you include the debt the U.S. government “owes itself” and Japan), but as Lynn points out, “Japan and the United States are “both far larger economies that also have their own currency.”
France’s currency is the euro, a “foreign” currency, meaning that, a wrinkle or two aside, it cannot simply print more money to pay its debt. Lynn wonders if another eurozone crisis is imminent. I don’t think so, not yet. With Christine Lagarde (a former French finance minister, who may still have greater ambitions at home) at the helm of the European Central Bank, ways would be found to paper over any cracks for now.
When Rishi Sunak unexpectedly announced a general election for the U.K. on July 4, it seemed that (notwithstanding approaching elections to the EU parliament) the biggest story in European politics would be the crushing of Britain’s Conservative Party. While a Tory catastrophe looks even more likely now, thanks to an incompetent campaign and the entry of Nigel Farage into the fray, that drama may be eclipsed by what is now unfolding across the Channel.