EU and Nato keep nervous eye on Marine Le Pen’s bid for French presidency
Far-right candidate wants to rein in Brussels’ power and take Paris out of military alliance’s command structures
There was a moment of relief for policymakers across the EU and Nato when President Emmanuel Macron won the most votes in the first round of the French election against far-right challenger Marine Le Pen.
But while Macron’s lead ahead of the April 24 run-off has eased acute concerns among officials in Brussels and across Europe, the potential remains for France to elect a president who wants to pull the country out of Nato’s military structures, tear up reams of EU legislation and restore relations with Russian president Vladimir Putin.
“I am very worried about it, I hope that we won’t get Le Pen as president of France,” Luxembourg foreign minister Jean Asselborn said this week, in a rare public rebuke of her candidacy by a foreign official — but a refrain heard regularly behind closed doors. “The French need to prevent this,” he said, adding that her victory “would not only mean a break away from the core values of the EU, it would totally change its course”.
While Le Pen has moderated her views on the EU since she was comfortably defeated by Macron in 2017, and no longer advocates leaving the EU or the euro single currency, she has called for a looser “Europe of Nations” and many of her legislative positions would undermine or breach Brussels’ treaties.
As a former member of the European parliament, her populist economic views on state aid and the lowering of domestic taxes on consumer goods would break EU free market regulations, much like her other policy pledges on immigration, trade and the supremacy of French law over the bloc.
That particular aspect of her presidential manifesto had long been a cause for concern inside the European Commission, EU officials said, given the substantial boost her presidency would give other countries such as Poland and Hungary which have challenged the supremacy of EU law, and are locked in longstanding judicial tussles with the bloc.
It would also likely derail the Franco-German relationship that has defined much of recent EU policymaking and steered the bloc’s development, and lead to potential gridlock, analysts said.
“From Marine Le Pen’s programme it is clear that she is more in favour of a Europe of Nations, for taking competences away from the EU, for taking into account the identity of individual nation states,” said Jacek Czaputowicz, Poland’s former foreign minister, in an interview with TV station Polsat News.
Despite his victory in the first round of voting, the liberal, strongly pro-EU Macron still faces a tight re-election battle, given that Le Pen’s protectionist economic policies and Euroscepticism are viewed as appealing to a large proportion of voters who backed other candidates in the first round.
Nato, the US-led military alliance, also stands to be dramatically overhauled by a Le Pen victory. The 53-year-old has vowed to withdraw France from Nato’s integrated military command structure, a step that would remove French troops and weapons from the pool of assets under alliance command.
That would represent a significant weakening of the alliance. France, which rejoined Nato command structures under president Nicolas Sarkozy in 2009, boasts the alliance’s third-largest military forces and fourth-largest defence budget, and is the most important military power inside the EU.
While Macron himself has caused his own share of angst among Nato allies — referring to the alliance’s state of “brain death” in 2019 and advocating an EU-led military presence to reduce the continent’s reliance on US firepower — he has recently restated his support for the military pact in light of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
Officials inside the military alliance said there was no sense of acute panic but that the run-off was being watched very closely, given the potential ramifications for Nato at a time of conflict in Ukraine and heightened fears of aggression by Moscow against Nato members.
Ian Bond, director of foreign policy at the Centre for European Reform, said president Le Pen “would be bad news for France’s relations with its EU and Nato partners, but good news for Putin”.
While Le Pen has voiced support for western sanctions against Russia in response to Putin’s invasion, she has said she sees Moscow as “a great power” that “could become an ally of France again” after the war ends.
Le Pen’s ties to Russia predate a 2014 loan from a Russian bank to her party, and her visit to meet Putin in the Kremlin ahead of the 2017 election.
“We must all rally behind Emmanuel Macron,” said Michael Roth, Germany’s former Europe minister and now chair of the Bundestag foreign affairs committee. “It’s either him or the downfall of a united Europe. It sounds a bit dramatic but that’s the way it is.”