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The French far-right could dynamite the relationships fundamental to the European project

We will find out which far-right candidate on July 7, when a Paris court rules on the appeal brought by Marine Le Pen, parliamentary leader of the Rassemblement National party, against her conviction for fraud, which came with a five-year ban on holding elected office. 

Le Pen has said she will hand the baton to party president Jordan Bardella if she loses her appeal. Her chances of overturning the sentence or drastically reducing the disqualification from office appear slim, given the evidence against her in the case. 

Theoretically, if she persisted with her candidacy, while still banned, it would in effect trigger a further review by the Constitutional Council, France’s highest court on electoral matters, of her right to run. The risk is if she lost that appeal, the RN would be forced to switch horses perilously late in the race. 

There’s a long way to April’s first round election, but whether it is Le Pen or Bardella, the RN looks all but assured of coming comfortably first on 32-35 per cent, according to an Elabe poll in late March.

Meanwhile, as my colleague Leila Abboud explains, there is an usually crowded field of potential runners and riders on the political centre ground including in Macron’s camp. Unless they can coalesce in the coming months, the chances of a far right victory will only grow.

For all these reasons, Bardella’s moves and utterances are attracting closer scrutiny in European capitals. In an interview with Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung this week, Bardella promised friendship and co-operation with Germany if elected. There was room for co-operation with German Chancellor Friedrich Merz on cutting business regulation, watering down the EU’s green deal and clamping down on immigration, he said. 

These are issues where Merz has already found common cause with Italy’s rightwing prime minister Giorgia Meloni. The echo with Meloni seems deliberate: Bardella would like to be seen as similarly sensible and pragmatic, working with like-minded rightwing leaders to change the EU from the inside.

In reality, Bardella would be anything but, as his FAZ interview underscored. If he was president, France would unilaterally pull out of EU asylum and immigration policy and disregard its legal obligations under EU law in this field. It would also rip up EU rules on electricity market pricing.

The RN would also pull France out of Nato’s integrated military command once Russia’s war against Ukraine is over. To be sure, this would be reverting to the country’s position within the alliance from 1966 to 2009. But US disengagement from Nato under Donald Trump has changed the context dramatically. For Europeans, there is no real alternative than pulling together more closely to “Europeanise” Nato. France and the UK are leading those efforts.

In contrast to Bardella, Meloni has remained fully committed to the Atlantic alliance and has stuck studiously to Italy’s EU obligations, although recent proposals from Rome to change electricity pricing may well fall foul of the bloc’s rules. 

If cherry picking EU policies was not bad enough, two other Bardella proposals would go down particularly badly in Berlin (neither of them, funnily enough, cropped up in his interview with the German daily). The RN wants to unilaterally cut billions from the French contribution to the EU budget, an affront to Germany which has long been the EU’s paymaster and will balk at having to pay more because of Paris. Bardella has also floated the idea, radioactive in Germany, of the European Central Bank monetising French debt.

Policies like these would put Paris on a collision course with Berlin, not just with the EU institutions, dynamiting a Franco-German relationship that for all its tensions and limitations has been fundamental to the European project. 

The German political establishment is already reeling from its estrangement from the US, so the “idea that they lose the axis with Paris, that’s a double blow”, says the senior EU policymaker.

The French far-right threat has been hanging over Europe for a long time, said a senior European diplomat, but the damage would be greater now given a dearth of leadership elsewhere in the bloc, including in Berlin. EU officials are sceptical that Merz and Meloni, despite their conservative kinship, could form a replacement for the Franco-German engine.

“If you have a rather dysfunctional German government and a populist rightwing French government opposed to new proposals coming from Brussels, the EU would become even more dysfunctional than it is now,” the diplomat said.

Sarah White examines the le Total bashing gripping France, a proxy for suspicion of capitalism in populist times.

Paola Tamma and Barbara Moens look at what would happen to tech services in Europe if the US pulled a killed switch.