There is no need to precede or wait for the French vote to decide the games in Europe, even if completing them is another matter entirely. Although a triumph of the Rassemblement national would not fail to have a powerful symbolic and propagandistic effect, the situation is already outlined in its main connotations. There has evidently been a decisive advance on the right, although not enough to completely overturn the European political picture, at least as far as numbers are concerned. The only unknown of greatest importance which we will urgently need to deal with is whether or not the famous “cordon sanitaire” which separates the conservative center from the nationalist far right exists or no longer exists. Many signs denounce the permeability, if not exactly the uncertainty, of this border. There has been no shortage of occasional openings from members of the EPP, starting from its president Manfred Weber, and even more so from the various national political forces that converge in the European People’s Party. Moreover, the government alliance between centrists, liberals and the nationalist and xenophobic right is a reality now experienced in several not exactly secondary European countries: from Holland, to Austria, to Sweden. Even the President of the Commission Ursula von der Layen has shown that she does not disdain some constructive relationship (of her own career) with at least part of the far right.
But the role of pioneer of a new axis of French (and then European) politics, decidedly shifted towards the right, rightfully falls to the president of the Republicans Eric Ciotti. However, his pact with the RN of Le Pen and Bardella radically split the party heir to Gaullism, which removed him from office, and unleashed a ferocious internal war.
If the social democrats to the left of the EPP were not also afraid of their shadow and had not spent all their little energy in supporting conservative, liberal and security policies, this mediocre French episode could contain a useful suggestion. In short, it would be a matter of ferreting out the popular ones, of finally discovering whether the cordon sanitaire really exists and with what consistency. To clarify, without ambiguity, whether the Christian, moderate, Atlanticist, liberalist and standard-bearer of financial morality is really willing to ally itself with xenophobic nationalists, variously permeated by para-fascist ideologies and corporate interests. As well as decidedly hostile to any hypothesis of deepening European political construction. Would they maintain internal ties within the EPP if such a hypothesis of alliance were to take shape? Or would we see a brawl like the one between the Républicains multiplied by a hundred or even a split in the People’s Party?
But how can we force such champions of ambiguity, subtext and government opportunism to come out into the open? There may be several paths, but one would seem to be the most within reach: destroying the Ursula majority so that it could only be rebuilt on the right. The brazen opportunism of the aristocratic Christian Democrats, the shameful retreat on the Green Deal, the reactionary course imposed on migration policies by relying on overseas dictatorships, the useless warmongering rhetoric, to recall only the major evidence, would have been more than enough to withdraw the social democratic confidence in the president of the Commission in search of an encore. A strong gesture of political clarification instead of the market, tedious and obscure to most, of appointments, positions and positions of power that was then chosen. Of course there would be a risk as with any real opportunity. But it would have been better to immediately see the path taken by the European Union without being dragged along step by step, emergency after emergency by the wiles of the People’s Party, as will promptly happen.
If Eric Ciotti openly showed us the impulses that run through a liberalism now distant from any idea of an open society, the Italian right found itself facing the obligatory trajectory of all nationalism, the one that inevitably leads it to conflict with its peers . So he had to slam the door in the face of his friend and admired political model Victor Orbán who could not tolerate the entry into the ECR, which has now been denied to him, of the far-right anti-Hungarian ultranationalists of the Romanian Aur. We could also rejoice in this inclination of nationalisms to destroy each other, which for now is expressed in the proliferation of parliamentary groups, if we did not know from long experience that it involves wars, oppression and dictatorship and, to begin with, the degeneration of the European political space into an arena for contests between national ambitions and claims.
