France’s vote matters in America
There may be revolution in the air in France, but not the Bastille kind. Winds of change are howling through the country from Calais to Cannes, and they could replace European unity with circle-the-wagons nationalism.
More so than any other election in Europe this year, France’s presidential ballot on Sunday is a referendum on the battered European Union. Though Brexit wobbled the bloc, it wasn’t the existential broadside the French election could deliver. The shadow over the EU’s future comes in the form of not one but two candidates — far right nationalist Marine Le Pen and left-wing populist Jean-Luc Melenchon.
Standing in the way of an EU meltdown: 39-year-old centrist Emmanuel Macron, an ex-investment banker who believes France’s prosperity is inextricably tied with Europe’s. Sunday’s contest is the election’s first round. If no candidate wins a majority, the top two vote-getters square off in a second round May 7 . ...
For the U.S. and the rest of the West, an integrated, cohesive Europe is a stronger, more reliable partner. It was Europe working as a collective entity that sent thousands of soldiers to bolster American military campaigns in Afghanistan and Iraq. U.S. sanctions on Russia following its invasion of Ukraine would have had less bite without the EU joining in. Russian President Vladimir Putin pines for the day that Europe fragments into insular, self-interested nationstates that he can meddle with more readily.
Le Pen, who flew to Moscow to meet Putin earlier this year, speaks the Kremlin’s everycountry-for-itself language. “The European Union will die!” she recently exhorted at a campaign rally in Lille. “The time has come to defeat the globalists!” The 48-year-old daughter of nationalist leader Jean-Marie Le Pen, who once called Hitler’s use of gas chambers a “detail of history,” Le Pen is staunchly antiimmigration, supports abandoning the euro and ultimately the EU, and touts protectionism to strengthen the French economy. ...
Ideologies aside, in many ways Melenchon’s positions mirror Le Pen’s. He also wants out of the EU and envisions France as a protectionist state. His advisers paint him as a French Bernie Sanders, though commentators have dubbed him a “French Chavez,” and for good reason — he has spoken admiringly of the late Venezuelan socialist leader . ...
Macron, a former economy minister for Socialist President Francois Hollande’s government, offers voters a distinct alternative: expansion of health services and vocational training for youth, support for an open door immigration policy, and an embrace of European unity. At a campaign speech earlier this year, he told the crowd France needs Europe “because Europe makes us bigger, because Europe makes us stronger.”
We hope French voters see the bigger picture — the need for European cohesion, now more than ever . ...