In May 2019, France elected 79 MEPs to the European Parliament by a proportional representation (PR) system, as a single constituency.
Scholars and analysts increasingly emphasize that under the influence of globalization, partisan systems across Western liberal democracies have experienced the emergence of a new political cleavage pitting proponents of Green, Alternative and Liberal (GAL) values, or “globalists” versus supporters of Traditional, Authoritarian and Nationalist, or “nationalists”. In the second round of the 2017 French presidential election, the opposition between Emmanuel Macron and Marine Le Pen perfectly embodied this new political divide.
The French political landscape of the 2019 European election clearly reflected this cleavage between “globalists” and “nationalists”. In the upper half of the political landscape hereafter, one finds the pro-European Union political parties that advocate further European integration.
On the upper-right quadrant, there is the party list Renaissance supported by Emmanuel Macron’s La République en Marche and the parties of his parliamentary coalition, the centrist Modem and the centre-right Agir. During the campaign, Renaissance took a stand in favour a European Union that would become a power to be reckoned with in globalization, and that would protect its citizens from international economic and geopolitical conflicts.
On the upper-left quadrant, one finds the party lists of Génération.s,Europe Ecologie-Les Verts and Envie d’Europe, the latter being supported by the French Socialist party. These parties expressed some criticism about the lack of democracy within EU institutions and the lack of social and ecological policies in the EU, but consider that the European level of governance is the most appropriate in order to face the challenges of the 21st century, most particularly globalization and the fight against climate change.
On the opposite side of the political landscape, at the very bottom of it, one finds the largest anti-EU party in French politics: Marine Le Pen’s Rassemblement National (formerly Front National). A staunch opponent of further European integration, the RN rather supports a national retrenchment considering that the national level of governance, rather than the European one, provides the most efficient lever of action to answer the challenges faced by European societies nowadays.
In between these two blocs, one finds two political parties that are “EU-critics”. On the left, La France Insoumise which considers that the existing institutional framework of the EU prevents political actors from pursuing the needed social and environmental reforms to deal with the issues raised by economic integration and climate change. Without openly calling for an exit from the EU, La France Insoumise wishes to install a balance of power by threatening to disobey to European treaties in order to alter policies nationally and within the EU.
Finally, on the right, there are Les Républicains which during this campaign suggested the need to redefine the perimeter of action of the EU distinguishing areas in which the EU has a real added value and other areas in which member-states needs to have more freedom and flexibility in making their own decisions.
Politicization of the 2019 European Electoral Campaign
Turnout in the 2019 European election in France increased by 8 percentage points compared to the 2014 election, going from 42 per cent to 50 per cent. This participation increase is the result of an early politicization of the European electoral campaign around the personalization of power exercised by the president Emmanuel Macron, the Yellow Vests protests that have disrupted French politics for several months, and the public debate on environmental issues.
As early as November 2018, during the commemorations of the end of the First World War, Emmanuel Macron began to frame the upcoming European elections as the battlefield between “the forces of progress” versus “the forces of nationalism”. In the following months, he personally intervened in the campaign by publishing a letter in newspapers across the EU member-states entitled “Pour une renaissance européenne” (For a European revival) on the 3rd of March 2019, presenting his project and ideas for the future of the EU. His personal engagement and the strong personalization of power allowed by the French institutions has led the most vocal opposition forces, in particular the right-wing Rassemblement National and the left-wing La France insoumise, to frame the EU election as an anti-Macron referendum.
This anti-Macron rhetoric has also been at the centre of the Yellow Vests protests that have erupted in France on 18 November 2018 and have been mobilizing citizens dissatisfied with the president’s policies across the country every Saturday since. The trigger for the Yellow Vests movement has been the increased taxation on fuel, but the movement’s demands quickly expanded toward the area of social justice and direct democracy. In this process, the main political targets of the Yellow Vests protestors became the president of the Republic and the wealth tax on the richest taxpayers that had been lifted by the government at the beginning of Emmanuel Macron’s mandate. One of the most visible slogans of the Yellow Vests movement demands the resignation of the president.
In addition to the “globalists” vs. “nationalists” and the anti-Macron frames, the 2019 European election campaign has also been characterized by the salience of environmental issues. The resignation of Nicolas Hulot, the very popular Minister of Ecological Transition on 29 August 2018, has spurred monthly demonstrations from September 2018 to March 2019, demanding a more serious approach to the fight against climate change. These demonstrations were later joined by striking high-school students. In parallel, on 17 December 2018, four NGOs launched an online petition threatening to pursue legal claim against the French state for its inaction with regard to global warming. In one month, 2 million people signed the petition, making it the largest and fastest growing petition ever made in France. Dissatisfied by the government’s response to the petition, the four NGOs have pursued legal action against the State on 14 March 2019.
The Results of the 2019 European Elections in France
The issues that have dominated French politics in the weeks and months prior to the European elections shed lights on the subsequent results.
The two parties that came ahead were the Rassemblement National with 23,3 per cent of the vote and Renaissance with 22,4 per cent of the voters. The former became the largest party, representing the “nationalists”, while the latter is the most pro-EU list, hence representing the “globalists” side of the political cleavage. This polarization between the party of Emmanuel Macron and the party of Marine Le Pen dominated the last couple of weeks of the campaign.
Behind these two parties, Europe Ecologie-Les Verts finished third, gaining 13,5 per cent of the vote, the best result for a French Green party since the European election of 2009. This electoral result and the fact that all major parties, except for the French conservatives of Les Républicains, have incorporated environmental issues in their manifestos may show a shift toward an increased importance of ecological issues in French politics.
Among the parties that received below 10 per cent of the vote, Les Républicains obtained8,5 per cent, La France insoumise 6,3 per cent, the socialist Envie d’Europe 6,2 per cent, the nationalist right-wing Debout la France 3,5 per cent, and Génération.s 3,3 per cent.
The most remarkable electoral development of the 2019 European election is the decline of Les Républicains to its lowest electoral result ever. The party lost 12 percentage points compared to the 2014 European election. Adopting a stance of opposition to both Renaissance and Rassemblement National, the French conservatives did not manage to make their voice heard. As a result, pensioners, who traditionally voted for the conservatives and who are more pro-EU than average, massively shifted their vote in favour of the Renaissance. In a similar fashion, many younger centre-left voters, who had voted for Emmanuel Macron in the 2017 Presidential election, shifted their support to Europe Ecologie-Les Verts on 26 May 2019.