France’s Attal: You want ‘Frexit’? Look at Brexit!

France’s prime minister Gabriel Attal has warned against the risks of a French EU exit if the far-right wins big at the polls, as overwhelming data shows the negative impacts of Brexit on the UK.

“Who were the Brexit’s first supporters? Who gave ‘Brexit street’ names? Who has openly displayed their support for the leader of the Brexit camp [Nigel Farage]? The Rassemblement National!” Attal said in a speech at France’s National Assembly last week.

With the RN significantly leading in the polls just four months out from the EU elections, Attal is positioning himself as the pro-EU leader, and he’s set to remind undecided voters that Brexit – which is turning out to be an economic and political catastrophe – was a work of the far-right.

“We can’t support leaving the EU unless one has other interests, unless one serves another country, another power,” the newly-appointment prime minister said in his speech, in a thinly-veiled hint to Rassemblement national’s enduring links to the Kremlin.

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Getting France “out of servitude”

Days after the Brexit vote back in June 2016, Marine Le Pen – presidential candidate for what was then known as the ‘Front national’, and now President of the RN’s parliamentary group – had celebrated the referendum outcome, and the UK’s decision to “get out of servitude”.

In 2017, Le Pen had vowed to follow suit with the Brits and hold a referendum on ‘belonging to the EU’ – a take that had scared off even her core voter base, fearing economic mayhem, and was removed from the future manifesto.

The RN “renounced its opposition” as it “worried public opinion,” Thierry Chopin, special advisor to the Jacques Delors Institute, a think-tank, wrote in Le Monde. But to this day, “[the party] defends a form of legal sovereignty that could lead to a ‘Frexit’ de facto”, in a shape similar to the Brexit divorce, he said.

This is most striking on immigration policy, where Le Pen and party president Jordan Bardella are calling for a full-blown referendum.

“European law takes precedence over French law [and the French judiciary] interpret it in a way that forbids control over immigration flows,” the party 2022 presidential manifesto reads.

It also blames the EU’s alleged policy weakness on the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) – a point often raised by pro-Brexit UK conservative leaders to push for radical immigration policy overhauls, including the deportation of asylum seekers to Rwanda.

As for Eric Zemmour, a 2022 presidential hopeful found guilty of enflaming racial tensions, he openly sides in favour of Brexit – last week posting a video of him warmly greeting Nigel Farage on social media.

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Serious about economics

And it doesn’t seem to matter if the only example to date of a country leaving the EU suggests it comes at high economic and political costs.

“Nobody that’s really serious about economics can say there hasn’t been a negative effect on the UK economy [post-Brexit],” John Springford, Associate Fellow at the Centre for European Reform (CER), a think tank, told Euractiv.

He cites the devaluation of the pound minutes after the vote, the slowing of GDP from 2017 on, net EU immigration numbers falling from 2018 and the hit on EU imports following the country’s withdrawal from the Single Market starting in 2019.

New research from Aston University also found up to 42% of British products exported to the EU disappeared from EU shops’ shelves in the 15 months following January 2021.

Meanwhile, half of Brits think Brexit had a negative impact on the UK in general, with only a quarter thinking it did the country good, The Guardian reported in December.

Opinium, a pollster, found 55% thought leaving the EU was a bad idea, against 33% in favour – it was at an almost perfectly 43% par in February 2020.

Ultimately, it’s unlikely the RN would ever go for a full-on exit, CER’s Springford said. Instead, it’s likely to go down the “Viktor Orbán route; that is, remain in the EU because the cost of leaving is too great, but increase fighting against EU law and stymie EU decision-making”.

The RN’s ‘Frexit’ days are not over, Renew Europe president Valérie Hayer told Euractiv. “Here’s where populist lies take you,” she said, using Brexit as a case in point of what happens when European nations give the far-right the green light. “This is what it looks like to leave the EU, and wanting to weaken the European project.”

This might just be the government’s new argument to snatch RN voters away, just four months ahead of polling time.

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(Théo Bourgery-Gonse | Euractiv.fr)

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