The upcoming parliamentary vote is shaping up to be a contest between progressives calling for deeper EU reform and eurosceptics determined to restore the role of the nation-state. On Wednesday, Nathalie Loiseau, who is top of the list for Mr Macron’s party in the elections, told the French daily Le Monde:“Mrs Le Pen is no longer talking about a ‘Frexit’ because she can see that the consequences of Brexit are not very glorious and that the French, by electing a pro-EU president in 2017, chose Europe. “But an exit from the EU remains her secret project.”
A fierce nationalist, Mrs Le Pen was forced to play down her anti-Europe message following her crushing defeat to Mr Macron in the May 2017 presidential election.
Since then she has shifted tack slightly, dropping calls for France to leave the eurozone and for a Frexit. Instead, she has pushed for an overhaul of the bloc from within, with its 28 member states taking back power from Brussels.
If Mrs Le Pen’s Rassemblement national (RN) “forms an alliance with other viscerally anti-European nationalists, their only project will be to block the European project,” Mrs Loiseau continued.
Mrs Le Pen is set to join forces with her EU allies to form a far-right, populist bloc in the parliament after the May 23-26 elections, which she says will be called the “European alliance of nations”.
Mrs Loiseau also accused the bloc’s nationalists of having a “great deal of sympathy for Vladimir Putin’s Russia”.
“The far-right parliamentary bloc they want to create is in fact Mr Putin’s group in the European parliament,” she said, without elaborating.
Mrs Le Pen shrugged off the accusations she was cosying up to a sometimes hostile Moscow later on Wednesday, saying: “Yesterday I was an agent of [US President Donald] Trump and today I am an agent of Putin. Tomorrow they’re going to find out that I am a reptile or a cannibal.”
Mr Macron and his allies are basically telling us that “we cannot make contact with other nations,” Mrs Le Pen told France 2 television.
She said: “Of course I speak to the Russians, to the Chinese, to the Indians, because they are great nations. But Mrs Loiseau seems to think that in order to be European you need to be at war with the entire world.”
Europeans are bracing for next week’s crunch vote, which looks set to radically transform the bloc’s political landscape for years to come.
Mrs Loiseau has cast the vote as a bitter showdown between advocates of a progressive, more ambitious Europe and anti-immigrant, eurosceptic populists – a challenge the likes of Mrs Le Pen have happily taken up.
Recent voting intention polls suggest that Mrs Le Pen’s RN is running neck-and-neck with Mr Macron’s République en Marche (REM) party, both on around 22 percent.
However an Elabe poll for BFM TV published on Wednesday showed the REM narrowly in the lead with 23.5 percent of the vote, compared with 22 percent for the RN.
But Mr Macron faces the very real possibility of his party coming second in the election, which would corrode his influence in Europe.
France’s vote will be held on May 26, with 74 seats in the EU parliament up for grabs.
The Elabe poll of 2,002 people was carried out online between May 12-14.