French fix is storing problems amid far-right threat

He was the EU’s chief Brexit negotiator so our paths crossed many times over the Brexit negotiations. He was a consummate professional, keeping not just the individual member states corralled behind a strategy but also the disparate groups in the European Parliament.

His appointment, at 73, by French president Emmanuel Macron (below) has an Italian technocratic caretaker Mario Draghi sort of feel to it, and I don’t necessarily say that as a criticism.

(Image: PA)

There’s a serious need in France to steady the buffs, and he’s a respected figure, from the centre-right, and just might be able to hold some sort of loose coalition together. As our French cousins would say, on verra (we’ll see).

Macron had called a snap election after his centrist Besoin d’Europe list lost heavily in the June European elections, losing 10 seats and only gaining 15% of the vote, while the far-right La France Revient! gained seven seats and 31% of the vote.

It was a gamble, and the arithmetic in the Assemblée Nationale after the two-stage legislative election is, from Macron’s perspective, challenging.

The two-stage element of the vote is important too to understand the numbers. The first stage took place on Sunday, June 30, but then, on the basis of those results, the parties did a hokey cokey and withdrew candidates in various of the 577 seats, urging their voters to back the candidate best-placed to beat the far-right. So by the second-stage vote on July 7 to elect all 577 members, many voters found themselves with a considerably narrower choice.

And even at that, most of the options were themselves fudgey coalitions stitched together for this election only.

The winners were the New Popular Front, a left-wing alliance (of, by my count, eight or so different parties who traditionally spend most of their time fighting each other) founded on June 10, securing 188 seats.

Macron’s Ensemble centrist alliance won 161 seats, with the far-right National Rally (RN) and its allies in third with 142 seats. So no party came anywhere near the 289 seats needed for a majority – cue the few weeks of horse-trading.

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But to my mind the result is a fix, and only stores up more problems for later. In the first round (just a week before, remember), RN took about 33%, NFP 28% and Ensemble 20%. This political horse-trading can only stoke up cynicism among the voters generally, and an anger among those voting for the far right, that will find a way out eventually.

Also, given Prime Minister Michel’s task of establishing a cordon sanitaire to keep the far right out, while an obvious short-term objective, only gives them martyr status, with all the position but none of the responsibility.

A similar pattern emerged this week in Germany, where the right-wing Alternative for Germany (AfD) made big gains in two state elections. In Thuringia, they are the biggest bloc, with the 88-seat Parliament having 31 AfD lawmakers, 23 from the centre-right CDU, 13 from the Left Party and only six from federal chancellor Olaf Scholz’s Social Democrats.

The Green Party were dumped from Parliament altogether, failing to make it above the threshold for election. Another entirely new party, the Sahra Wagenknecht Alliance (BSW), won 15 seats. I struggle to even work out what their ideology actually is. Named after their charismatic leader after she split from the Left Party, they are economically left but socially right (anti-woke might be a good description), sceptical of the EU, Germany’s support for Ukraine, refugee policy and even Covid vaccine policy.

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In neighbouring Saxony, the result was a narrow win for the centre-right CDU on 41 seats, but with AfD on 40 and Sahra Wagenknecht Alliance on 15, the SPD steady on 10 seats, the Greens and Left parties taking big losses – the Greens down five seats to seven, and the Left only just squeaking above the threshold, losing eight seats to six.

It is easy to draw too many conclusions from the results in France and Germany, much as it hasn’t stopped elements of the UK press from doing just that. Two state elections are not representative of the national German picture, and the French result says to my mind more about discontent with President Macron and the world in general as it does any rise of the right.

But I’m still worried. In the US, the Tea Party fanatics never actually won power, they just terrified both sides of the aisle into increasing acts of madness until Trump took over the Republican Party. There’s a danger that we all make the same mistake.

Like in France, German politicians are all talking of a Brandmauer (firewall) to keep AfD out. Fair do’s, and it might work for a while, but in a democracy, surely we need to dig into why many voters are rejecting the centre and going to the extremes of right and left? One of the few things that unites RN, AfD and BSW is Euroscepticism, and here’s where Brexit provides a lesson in what not to do.

Over decades in the UK, the anti-EU parties were derided and belittled by the UK parties. But few (I’d like to say we actually did in Scotland) actually took on their arguments, preferring instead to write them off as crackpots and racists.

Turns out they had tapped into something – a popular visceral discontent with the centre and a desire for change. The fact that they had misdirected it against the EU was just the mechanism.

Voters need to feel the system works, that there’s diligent and serious people working to make their lives better. Many don’t feel that, and in the age of TikTok, disinformation and outright lies, we all need to raise our game lest they abandon democracy altogether. If the EU is about sharing experience, there’s a whole big lesson in Brexit that I’m not sure other countries are heeding.