The French leader admitted that far-right leader Marine Le Pen’s party could expand its power in Brussels after next May’s vote. During a debate at a university in Brussels the 40-year-old centrist said the EU election will be “a battle between those who still believe in Europe and those who no longer believe in Europe”. This combat between those who want more Europe and those who want less is “fundamental”, he stressed, before denying claims he was dumbing down the election debate by framing the fight for parliament seats as one between “progressives and nationalists”.
Mr Macron was referring to comments made by conservative chief Laurent Wauquiez earlier this month, who accused the young president of trying to turn Europe’s nationalists into bogeymen.
Mr Wauquiez, leader of the opposition Les Républicains party, told France Inter radio, said: “Mr Macron is developing a strategy that is woefully cynical, and which consists in telling voters: ‘It’s me or chaos; me or the far right’.”
Mr Macron has repeatedly framed the EU election as a clash between anti-immigrant nationalists and pro-EU progressives like himself.
He recently sent emissaries across 27 EU countries to build contacts and seek out like-minded parties that could join his movement in the wake of the vote.
He has however denied trying to “crush the differences” between the two opposing movements.
He said: “We cannot forget who our main opponent is during an election, or we risk to make a mistake… Our main opponent is the nationalist camp. Which is a camp made up of demagogues – a term I think is more appropriate than populists.”
The race to parliament will be tough, Mr Macron said, as he warned that far-right parties were likely to win a majority of seats, further expanding their strength across Europe.
He said: “In my country, the top European party is the [far-right] Rassemblement national … But has it improved Europe? No.”
Mrs Le Pen’s party won 23 seats in the 2014 European Parliament elections – more than any other French party.
It also moved ahead of Mr Macron’s La République En Marche (LREM) party for the first time in a poll of voting intentions published earlier this month.
The Ifop poll showed Mr Macron’s centrist movement with 19 per cent of voting intentions compared to 20 per cent in the last poll at the end of August, while Mrs Le Pen’s RN rose to 21 per cent from 17 per cent previously.
While the election, held every five years since 1979, has not always made waves, next year’s polls promise to have more impact as the fractures in national politics reach European level.
Recent national and regional elections across Europe, most recently in Germany, have seen a surge in support for far-right populist parties, at the expense of the traditional centre-right conservative and centre-left social democrat parties, creating messier, harder-to-rule coalitions.
Nationalist parties in countries like Italy, France, Poland and Hungary are determined to show through the vote that European integration has gone too far, and are tapping into the growing disaffection among the mainstream left and right to garner support.