Populists and the far right in Italy and France are mounting a multi-pronged assault on French President Emmanuel Macron, hoping to unsettle his centrist, pro-Europe agenda ahead of European Parliament elections in May, while also shoring up their own bases.
Italian Deputy Prime Minister Matteo Salvini of the right-wing League Party and Italian Deputy Prime Minister Luigi di Maio of the populist, anti-establishment Five Star Movement, have sought to rile Macron on a host of inflammatory issues.
Salvini and Di Maio appear to believe that in attacking Macron, a strong Europhile, their core voters in Italy would be motivated. Macron has been upfront in framing the European election as a battle between anti-immigrant nationalists and pro-EU “progressives” like himself.
In the ballot, he hopes to carry the center and, along with allies, potentially build the largest bloc in the European Parliament. The far right and populists believe that they might win a third or more of the vote, shattering traditional power bases.
With vocal support for France’s often violent “Yellow Vests” movement and suggestions that Macron’s administration is driving neo-colonialism in Africa, the Italian duo have ignored the convention of not interfering in another country’s politics.
The rise in tension shows how divisive the May 23 to 26 election is set to be, and hints at shifts in Europe’s political landscape that resemble populism in the US, with fringe parties looking to overturn centrists such as Macron.
Macron and his ministers have mostly claimed the high ground, ignoring many of the Italian politicians’ charges, while issuing flat responses to others.
However, on Tuesday, angered by Di Maio’s accusations that Paris is worsening poverty in Africa and encouraging migration to Europe, the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs took the unusual step of calling in Italy’s ambassador.
On Wednesday, the ministry went further, dismissing Salvini’s claims that Macron is unpopular and his hope that Macron’s En Marche movement would lose in the European ballot.
“These unfounded statements should be read in the context of domestic Italian politics,” French Ministry of Foreign Affairs spokeswoman Agnes von der Muhll said. “They are unacceptable.”
In the French National Assembly, French Minister for European Affairs Nathalie Loiseau said that Salvini was playing to a domestic audience and would have no impact in France.
“We’re not going to be drawn into a stupidity contest,” she said.
Asked if Macron had spoken about Salvini and Di Maio at the weekly Cabinet meeting on Wednesday, French government spokesman Benjamin Griveaux said: “No, because we only discuss issues that are important to the country.”
While Salvini has long been an outspoken critic of Macron, the assault by Di Maio is relatively new and is a sign of the problems that his Five-Star Movement is having domestically, where it has been falling in polls ahead of the EU vote.
The Five-Star Movement is seeking new alliances within the EU and sees France’s “Yellow Vests,” who have said that they would run candidates in the election, as a potential ally.
“Similar to other European governments, the French government is now mostly interested in protecting the interests of the elites and the privileged, but not of the people,” Di Maio wrote earlier this month. “Yellow Vests, don’t give up!”
Yet, while Macron dismisses Salvini and Di Maio as meddling outsiders, he faces a similar assault at home from far-right Rassemblement National party leader Marine Le Pen, who hopes to ally her party with Salvini’s in the European Parliament.
Le Pen, soundly defeated by Macron in the 2017 French presidential vote, launched a campaign this month to turn the French against a new Franco-German treaty of unity and commitment to Europe.
In videos — including one on Twitter viewed 165,000 times — Le Pen claimed the treaty would involve France surrendering territory to Germany in the Alsace and Lorraine border regions, that French citizens there would have to learn German and that Macron was considering sharing France’s permanent UN Security Council seat with Germany.
The Aachen (known as Aix-la-Chapelle in France) treaty signed on Tuesday included none of those things, but in an era when social media can have more impact than official documents, the Elysee Palace issued a firm rebuttal of Le Pen’s claims.
“NON, Alsace and Lorraine will not be transferred to Germany,” it said, using capitals several times.
Le Pen, whose party has taken a 9 million euro (US$10.26 million) loan from a Russian bank and whose social media activity is frequently amplified by pro-Kremlin accounts, seems to be aiming to shore up worries among her voter base about France giving up sovereignty and a lack of emphasis on national identity.
In some opinion polls, Le Pen’s party is marginally ahead of Macron’s on Europe. If her vote is combined with other far-right parties in France, they are several points clear.
However, campaigning has not begun in earnest. Macron is spending the next two months conducting a nationwide debate to “listen” to French voters and respond to the “Yellow Vests,” the most serious challenge his presidency has faced.
The rupture between Italy and France is not just about the May election, but a more fundamental shift in ties between neighbors who helped to found the European project, Montaigne Institute political consultant Dominique Moisi said.
France’s greater closeness to Germany has left Italy feeling looked down upon, and that has fueled resentment, not just among populists and the far right, but among Italian elites, Moisi said.
“Seen from Rome ... there’s a very emotional feeling toward France, as if it has scorned and even abandoned Italy,” he wrote this month.
“From the crisis in Libya, a country that Italy knows well, to the migration issue, Italians feel that at each turn they have been deliberately ignored by a country that increasingly, and with less and less justification, looks down on them,” he added.
If true, Salvini and Di Maio could succeed in exploiting those sentiments by bashing France in the run-up to the May vote. For Di Maio, that effort is clear in his attempts to align his movement with the “Yellow Vests.”
Le Pen — who like Salvini has met Steve Bannon and taken advice on how he engineered US President Donald Trump’s 2016 US presidential victory — is taking a similar tack, albeit on different issues.
Where Le Pen and Salvini might fall down, according to Guillaume Liegey, a pollster who worked on Macron’s 2017 French presidential campaign, is if they focus too heavily on immigration, which for Le Pen and Salvini has been a mainstay issue.
Voters are ultimately concerned with feeling secure and being listened to, not mass migration, Liegey said in a Guardian article last week, citing a poll that his group conducted.
Macron’s “grand debate” might enable him to show that he is listening to voters’ concerns. There are already signs that his popularity ratings, once barely more than 20 percent, have started to climb again, although only by a few points.
“If the populist danger can be averted in Europe, a key part of the solution lies not in pandering to anti-migrant slogans, but in working to burst the bubbles that people are all too often locked into,” Liegey said.
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