Olly Haynes – France: A return of the Euro-critical left?

There has always been a euro-sceptic left-wing consciousness in France, and it may be about to rear its head once again.

Olly Haynes works regularly in France, and has reported across Europe, bringing that coverage and expertise to the site. He has written for the Guardian, Vice World News, The i newspaper, Rolling Stone UK, Huck Magazine, Novara Media, Open Democracy and many others.

Cross-posted from Conter

When president Jacques Chirac called a referendum on whether France should ratify the treaty of the EU constitution, he assumed that his side – the Yes Vote – would walk it. This was not an entirely unreasonable assumption. In September 2004, 9 months before the referendum would be held, Yes was polling at 69% voting intention. 

Aurelien Bernier, the author of Que Faire de L’Union Europeen (What Is To Be Done About The European Union) tells me that the implications of the treaty were enormous. “In 2005 the project of the European constitutional treaty continued the line of the Maastricht treaty in its neoliberal orientation, aiming to constitutionalise this European orientation. It’s not entirely clear what the juridical implications of adopting the treaty would have been, but then as now,  the only rampart against European law, the only limit against the total and unconditional application of European law, was national constitutions. There are particular cases where European law would trump national constitutional law, but at least in theory, EU law is subordinate to constitutions, so to have an EU constitution would have risked there no longer being any limit to the primacy of EU law”. 

This realisation, that the constitution would have locked the EU into a neoliberal line that superseded national law, would play a major role in how the referendum turned out. By early January 2005, when Chirac announced that the referendum would occur before the summer, the Yes vote had dropped to 65% although it had considerably further to fall. When the referendum results came in on the 29th of May, No had beaten Yes by 54.7% to 45.3%. Three days later the Dutch people also overwhelmingly rejected the same constitution. 

However, the No vote was not the end of the saga, in 2008 the French parliament approved the Lisbon Treaty, a minor rewriting of the constitution’s proposed rules though without the added weight of constitutional status, and Sarkozy gave it presidential assent despite being elected on a line resembling the politics of the No vote. 

The No vote and the subsequent ratification of the Lisbon treaty set in motion several processes that prepared the stage for the current era of French politics. Bernier says that in France the debate took place mostly over the question of economics. There were of course the questions of internal politics which always enter into these debates, but honestly the central theme of the debate was the neoliberalism of the European Union”. This rejection of neoliberalism by a majority of the French public saw the creation of a left alternative to the Parti Socialiste. The PS’ left wing had defied the leadership and campaigned for no and began to whisper about the possibility of an exit from their party. 

That moment for that exit arrived in 2008, when the left’s eurosceptic line was trounced by the two pro-European lines at the PS congress in Reims. Mélenchon and Marc Dolez quit the party to form the Parti de Gauche. Although it took them three years from the referendum to leave, senior figures in what is now La France Insoumise often say that the project was born on the 29th of May 2005 when it became apparent that there was a constituency for a politics opposed to neoliberalism among the French public. 

Although Hollande would go on to win the presidential election in 2012, he did so without recognising the shifting political landscape that the referendum had revealed. In order to see off the threat from Mélenchon’s presidential campaign Hollande had tacked to the left, though he quickly shifted right while in government. Hollande’s coalition was split between middle class voters more amenable to the politics of Yes and working class voters who had voted for or were sympathetic to No. As PS Senator Mickaël Vallet recently wrote the No vote “highlighted the distance between the Socialist Party and the popular classes like never before […] the adoption of the Lisbon Treaty in a free vote by the Socialist parliamentary groups confirmed the rupture”, when Hollande’s government failed to challenge the austerity demanded by Frankfurt and Brussels and undermined workers rights through the El Khomri law, the members of the popular classes that had given the PS one final chance quickly abandoned the party. 

The referendum also demonstrated the existence for the first time of the bourgeois bloc that would go on to form the social base for Macronism. The PS and the Gaullist UMP were becoming so close in their positions that voters started disparagingly referring to them as the UMPS. The epithet was captured by the appearance of Sarkozy and Hollande on the cover of Paris Match, putting their differences aside to campaign for Yes. 12 years on Macron would crash through the middle of the UMP and the PS pulling in their middle class voters into a new bourgeois formation. The political philosopher Jean-Loup Bonammy argued recently “in a certain way you could argue that Macronism was born in that photo, if nothing opposed the UMP to the PS anymore, then why not reunite them into a single party?”

The period following on from the referendum saw the far right start initially stagnating and then soon climbing rapidly in the polls. Bernier says that while the economic crisis of 2008 with its attendant offshoring of production and immigration attributed as the cause of the crisis is the main driver of the far right’s growth, that “given that the EU bears major responsibility for the crisis it is difficult to distinguish between how much is down to the discourse of the far right on immigration and how much is down to the EU”. We also see that the far right, or the nationalist right in Europe progresses via this eurosceptic discourse, and criticism of neoliberalism”. 

20 years on from the referendum and euroscepticism isn’t what it used to be. The polarisation of French politics into three blocs has made it difficult for any force to present a strongly eurosceptic line. Although euroscepticism was part of the formula which allowed both La France Insoumise and the Rassemblement National (formerly the Front National) to achieve the sorpasso in 2017 with their social democratic and gaullist competitors, the disaster of Johnson’s Brexit and the need to seek alliances with the social democrats and greens on the left, and with big business on the right, has left Frexit off the table. Now the left speaks of disobeying the treaties and the right criticises specific parts of EU legislation, but exit is no longer considered an option. 

Bernier, a diehard eurosceptic who wants to withdraw from the EU believes that new forces could emerge out of opposition to the EU’s increasing militarisation. La France Insoumise has had to dust off its old sovereignist lines to oppose Von Der Leyen’s rearmament plan, and Europe’s pro-Palestine movements are increasingly at loggerheads with the liberal zionism of the EU. Even Pedro Sanchez, the social democratic Prime Minister of Spain finds himself regularly conflicting with the EU and NATO on the issues of Israel and military spending. The second half of the 2020s might yet mark the return of the euro-critical left. 

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