France in flux following Le Pen ruling

Arab News

17-05-2025

https://arab.news/b8rtm
In 2022, the UK was widely ridiculed internationally for having three prime ministers in a single year. Yet, France went one better in 2024 with a remarkable four premiers in office within 12 months.
The French political landscape may appear to have stabilized in 2025, but there remains much volatility. With President Emmanuel Macron having just two years left to serve in his final term, the key question in French politics is who will succeed him.
Since last year's snap legislative elections, Macron has spent much more time focusing on international affairs, with his approval ratings in some April and May 2025 trackers below 30 percent with disapproval over 70 percent. While he may try to reassert himself in domestic affairs, the clock is ticking on his presidency.
Macron's main domestic political goal is to prevent the French right-wing, populist National Rally from winning the presidency. Before this spring, there had seemed a strong possibility that the party's leader and favorite of US President Donald Trump, Marine Le Pen, could prevail in 2027, as she still might.
In most polls from 2023 to March 2025, Le Pen was the lead candidate. Typically, she scored well over 30 percent, significantly above her nearest rival Edouard Philippe, who has been serving as mayor of Le Havre since 2020, having been prime minister from 2017 to 2020.
Yet, on March 31, a French court sensationally found Le Pen guilty of embezzling EU funds and barred her from standing for public office for five years. This result, which Le Pen is appealing against, could yet destabilize French politics.
It is possible, for instance, that Le Pen's National Rally may try to bring down the government of Prime Minister Francois Bayrou. In 2024, his centrist MoDem party was also ruled by courts to have been involved in misusing European Parliament funds to pay for party work in France, but he was not personally implicated.
Another way in which the judicial decision may undermine French political stability is by making Le Pen a political martyr. Her protege, 29-year-old Jordan Bardella, who is RN's president and may well stand in 2027, blasted the judges by saying 'it is not only Marine Le Pen who is being unjustly condemned, it is French democracy that is being executed.'
Polls since March 31 have tended to show Bardella as the leading candidate now. In April, polls showed him above 30 percent, well ahead of Philippe.
As much as the French judicial decision against Le Pen is legally sound, it has given global populists, including Hungary's Prime Minister Viktor Orban, the political ground to rally around her.
The judicial decision may make Le Pen a political martyr.
Andrew Hammond
Tesla CEO Elon Musk, who had been leading Trump's DOGE initiative, meanwhile, compared the judicial ruling to that of the US president's legal troubles before he won last November's election. He added that 'this will backfire, like the legal attacks against President Trump. When the radical left can't win via democratic vote, they abuse the legal system to jail their opponents.'
Musk's sentiment also echoes the warnings of US Vice President J.D. Vance, who asserted in February that the biggest threat to Europe is not from China or Russia but 'from within,' including what they claim is a decline in free speech.
While Vance is wrong, events have given him bragging points. For the French judicial decision follows a similar one in Romania late last year when the Romanian constitutional court barred rightist Calin Georgescu, who won the nation's first round presidential election last November, from standing in the second round after allegations of Russian interference.
While both the French and Romanian authorities appear to have acted diligently, it remains a truism that populists are best defeated at the polls. Of course, even then, as in the November 2020 US presidential election, populists such as Trump will often cry foul when they lose. But the ballot box is nonetheless the best way of countering insurgent right-wing politicians.
The outcome of the 2027 French presidential election will, therefore, be a key test of how much global populism might continue to grow. In the post-1945 era, France is one of the few European countries not to have — yet — had a populist national leader.
The backstory to this battle for France's political heart and soul is a huge growth in populism over the past quarter of a century. In 2000, only a handful of key states with populations over 20 million, including Italy, had populist leaders. This was an era that saw, for instance, the controversial billionaire businessman Silvio Berlusconi as a maverick prime minister from 2001-2006 in Italy, presaging the rise of Trump.
This relatively small populist club expanded significantly after the onset of the 2008-09 international financial crisis, which led to Trump's first presidential win in 2016. Yet, the wave may not yet have peaked, with Europe fast becoming perhaps the single most important center of global populism.
As much as this vision is the wrong one for Europe, populists are increasingly winning power. The influence that Trump has over European populists is shown by perhaps his biggest admirer in the continent, Orban. During Hungary's six-month presidency of the EU in the second half of 2024, he made the official slogan into one loaded with Trumpist lexicon: 'Make Europe Great Again,' or MEGA.
In this context, center-right and center-left European leaders must do much more to push back at this misguided, populist MEGA vision. Europe's moderate politicians, including in France, need to show they can work together better to deliver political and economic progress across the bloc to thwart the damaging political tide which Le Pen and Orban represent.