🇫🇷Weekly Dispatch - Taking the lead
10 March 2024 - Emmanuel Macron takes the lead on Ukraine, France enshrines abortion in the constitution, and Renaissance launches it’s European Parliament 2024 campaign
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This week
🇺🇦Emmanuel Macron takes the lead on Ukraine
🖋️France enshrines abortion in the constitution
🇪🇺Renaissance launches EP 2024 campaign
🇺🇦Macron takes the lead on Ukraine
The last two weeks have seen a very forward thinking, and almost aggressive, Emmanuel Macron, fighting for incredibly strong positions such as the possible sending of French and European troops to Ukraine.
I won’t go into all of the specific points here, but do subscribe and keep an eye out for a big summary coming up on the horizon from your favourite dispatch.
Ahead of a meeting with Parliamentary party leaders at the Elysée, similar to one last October, the President had made a decision to try to get the French Assemblée in order, and to push the leaders on their decisions.
Arguing that it he “thinks it will clarify” the positions of all involved, one of his big goals was to force a reaction from two of the big opposition groupings: The Rassemblement National and La France Insoumise.
Both having shown pro-Russian sentiments over last years and who have come out aggressively against his positions recently on the potential need to send French troops to Ukraine.
His goal, aside from pushing support for French efforts to back Ukraine, is to force the opposition to take a firm position to either outright support his propositions, or to come out strongly against them and outline why.
And it won’t hurt if this leads to the opposition taking a position that will potentially hit them in the polls (Looking at the RN here).
Naturally, the two opposition parties attacked the meeting, with the spokesperson of the RN, Philippe Ballard, taking shots at the meeting and avoiding the core of the issue:
“There’s a lot of communication, but Emmanuel Macron is the champion, he does it from Monday to Sunday... The conventions or meetings he organises, generally, don't lead to much...”
And from the far-left, Manuel Bompard criticised a lack of respect and democracy in the actions of the president:
“If we really want to have a dialogue with the opposition, first we should have a discussion, and then he should speak…he should not speak, and then come and explain to us what he meant to say or what he didn't mean to say. I think that would have been more respectful of normal democratic functioning".
And while the specifics of the meeting weren’t laid out publicly, we know that the president re-iterated one key point: “Faced with an enemy that sets no limits, we cannot allow ourselves to set any".
Emmanuel Macron’s fight to support Ukraine, ultimately, will then be carried by his party Renaissance in the Assemblée National, with a parliamentary debate taking place in this coming week.
“We’ll see who is for Ukraine and who is for Putin”
- Anonymous deputy from the presidential majority to France Info
However, we need to be clear that there have been concerns from other parties that the debate on Ukraine may be instrumentalised by the various actors for purely electoral goals.
Eric Ciotti, the President of Les Républicains, has hypothesised that this could be an attempt to take down the Rassemblement National:
“We can clearly see the little scenario that the President of the Republic is setting up of a duel against the Rassemblement National. This duel is no stranger to his appearance, and it's all the more serious.”
But let’s also remember: he’s also campaigning in the upcoming European Parliament Elections, so take the concern with a spoonful of salt.
Ultimately, a lot will begin to be decided when it comes to France’s response to Ukraine, but with Macron having already argued that France could send it’s troops to Ukraine if the frontline advances “in the direction of Odessa or Kyiv”, things are going to be get interesting.
🖋️France enshrines abortion in the constitution
This week saw a groundbreaking event in French history, as the Assemblée National voted in favour of enshrining the freedom to have an abortion into the constitution.
A reaction to the rolling back of abortion and women’s rights in the United States of America, Poland, Hungary, and other places, and this was referenced in the opening speech of Prime Minister Gabriel Attal:
“It takes one generation, one year, one week for things to change drastically, [such as for] American women who must fight for abortion rights…[and] Hungarians and Poles for whom abortion is no longer an enshrined freedom”
Regardless, it seems that the vast majority of parliamentarians appearing in Congress in Versailles, reuniting the 925 deputies from the Senate (348) and Assemblée National (577), to vote to change the constitution.
Out of 902 deputies present, 780 voted in favour, 72 voted against, and 50 abstained.
With the ceremony of the inscription taking place this Friday, many took inspiration from the efforts that were made from the French government, even if there was no major opposition to the efforts.
However, this isn’t the end of the fight.
Using the opportunity to stake his position and go above and beyond this week’s events, Emmanuel Macron has called for the right to abortion to be enshrined in the European Union’s Charter of Fundamental Rights.
“Today is not the end of the story. It is the start of a fight,We’re going to lead this fight in our continent, in our Europe, where reactionary forces are attacking women’s rights before attacking the rights of minorities, the oppressed…This is why I want to enshrine that guaranteed freedom to abortion in the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union”
With the resurgent far-righ being the greatest opposition to this kind of initiative, this can clearly be seen as the French President throwing down the gauntlet to these actors, most notably those like Marine Le Pen and Viktor Orban.
But is there much chance of this passing? With the likely veto of the more extremist actors in the European Council, this proposal will not only take quite a lot of time, but will run into a lot of difficulties.
🇪🇺Renaissance launches EP 2024 campaign
To finish off this week, lets move over to the politics of it all.
Saturday saw the Presidential party, Renaissance, launch it’s campaign for the European Parliamentary elections in 2024, and put forward it’s tete de liste, Valérie Hayer.
While your favourite publication was unable to attend due to other plans that took priority, much of what we expected from the meeting came to fruition, with points being made on the war in Ukraine, the need to defeat Putin, and the necessity of the European Union to help keep France strong and independent.
However, the campaign faces several big issues, with one of the biggest being that the tete de liste, MEP Valérie Hayer, is mostly only known to those who work in the European Parliament, or those who are members of the Presidential party.
This was even referenced by the Jeunes Avec Macron, the Renaissance youth wing, during the event, with members shouting statements like “I don’t think you know her, she comes from Mayenne and she is going to win, her name is Valérie Hayer.”
Look, it sounds better in French, just roll with it.
Personally, within my fairly broad political circles, this issue is raised a lot, with very few of the people I engage or work with actually knowing of the candidate, and expressing surprise that the majority didn’t select a more well-known candidate.
However, as one of the most influential MEPs in the European Parliament, according to several indices, her selection makes a lot of sense from a competency point of view.
However, another major issue is the sheer gap between Renaissance and the Rassemblement National, who appear to be leading Renaissance by the nose and currently have it a 10% lead in the most recent IFOP polling.
And this has been complicated by the fact that, in a lot of cases, the attacks on the RN simply aren’t sticking.
No matter how many times they target the opposition forces on their poor record in the European Parliament, Russia, Ukraine, women’s rights, workers rights, or anything, the attacks seem to continually be brushed off by their European leader, Jordan Bardella.
It’s for this reason that the party assembled the heavyweights from the party, the government, and the presidential majority, to make a show of force, with everyone from Stephane Séjourné, Edouard Philippe, and Gérald Darmanin working to motivate the troops ahead of what will potentially be a very disappointing election, and a harbinger of worse to come.
While we’ll have to wait and see what the final list will look like, the ultimate question remains in all of our heads:
Will it work? Or will all of this simply lead to Marine Le Pen’s party weakening Europe more than it already has?
Let’s hope that the pro-European party has prepared itself well enough to do the job it needs to do.
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Speaking about the EP elections, one of my favorite politologists and opinion-makers in Sweden has recently written several articles about how the nationalsits in Europe har become Europeans. To make a long story short, it is about how far-right and similar political parties are now communicating about what kind of Europe they want rather than being anti-Europe. If you want, I could write a guest article about that.