Social Europe

politics, economy and employment & labour

  • Themes
    • Strategic autonomy
    • War in Ukraine
    • European digital sphere
    • Recovery and resilience
  • Publications
    • Books
    • Dossiers
    • Occasional Papers
    • Research Essays
    • Brexit Paper Series
  • Podcast
  • Videos
  • Newsletter

The French Right Might Pave The Way For The Extreme Right: Sleepwalking Towards Frexit

Wolfgang Kowalsky 29th November 2016

Wolfgang Kowalsky

Wolfgang Kowalsky

The French ‘patronat’, the business lobby group aka Medef, had for a long time the reputation of being the most stupid in the world. Today, the French political right is on the way to taking its place.

Even a superficial analysis of the Brexit referendum and the US elections shows that the losers of unfettered globalisation and unregulated digitisation are hitting back. The pendulum swinging towards neoliberalism in recent decades is now moving in the opposite direction. Trump’s phrase ‘the forgotten men and women of our country will be forgotten no longer’ pays homage to the populace in the US that feels threatened by globalisation and digitalisation without any form of compensation. It addresses the ‘rust belt’, the 3.5 million lorry drivers who are scared by forecasts of ongoing automatisation, robotisation and driverless cabs, and those left behind in regions on the way to complete de-industrialisation. Trump’s badly designed Keynesian stimulus package will help to create jobs and so bring comfort to some of the people who have been left behind – as Stiglitz put it here.

If you want to fight the increase of the Far Right, solve the problems – of an out-of-control financial sector, mass-unemployment, unequal income and wealth distribution instead of muddling through the crisis and prolonging collateral damage by following stupid rules of overzealous budget consolidation.

The programme of the French right-wing candidate Francois Fillon is the exact opposite: anti-Keynesian and openly anti-job creation, propagating severe cuts in public budgets and downsizing by half a million the number of employees in public services. What more is needed to frighten ‘Billancourt’, the industrial remainder of France? In a context of shrinking job perspectives, the game is becoming ever easier for the Far Right.

As in the 1920s and ‘30s, it will need to do little more than simply copy/paste from trade union programmes and incorporate a strong social dimension into its populist approach. That is what the Front National leader Le Pen did immediately after Fillon’s coronation.


Our job is keeping you informed!


Subscribe to our free newsletter and stay up to date with the latest Social Europe content. We will never send you spam and you can unsubscribe anytime.

Sign up here

The French trade unions are in a ‘double bind’: they have no choice but to sharply criticise both Fillon and Le Pen. The voters understand and know that their implicit message is to support the left candidate. However, the strategy seems condemned to fail. Many voters have had enough of the current left-wing government and wish to vote for a change. The right wing offers no real perspective of change, but a programme which could have been cooked up in the kitchen of the European Commission’s DG ECFIN, where many hardliners who have completely missed the new trends survive (and thrive).

From the Far Right perspective, which is in any case against all forms of European integration, it will be easy to kill two birds with one stone – be against Europe and against Fillon. Who will be able to stop the momentum towards the election of a Far Right president followed by a referendum on Europe, ending with #Frexit, the next exit after Brexit?

Looking into the near future: just as a French referendum on Europe might get under way it would be too late to react effectively – it will be about damage control. But the result might be even clearer than in the UK, as parts of the Far Left are anti-European as well. And the tragedy will repeat itself as farce. Just as during the Brexit campaign, the united pro-European French establishment supported by the pro-European establishment in Brussels and other Member States will not be able to find good arguments for staying inside Europe, simply because the right-wing candidate uses Europe to defend a neoliberal agenda.

What might the content of the pro-European campaign of the French right be? To defend ultra-liberalism at a time when the Commission is cautiously turning away from it and towards a Keynesian investment plan? Under these conditions a referendum on the question of leaving or staying in Europe would be lost in advance. Since the French referendum on the constitutional treaty in 2005, the pro-Europeans are losing one election (or referendum) after another. The other European Member States need a plan B now. How to design European integration without France…

Sleepwalking towards the end of the European Union as we know it has begun. Is there still anybody, anywhere around to stop it?

Wolfgang Kowalsky

Wolfgang Kowalsky is a policy adviser working in the trade union movement in Brussels.

You are here: Home / Politics / The French Right Might Pave The Way For The Extreme Right: Sleepwalking Towards Frexit

Most Popular Posts

Russian soldiers' mothers,war,Ukraine The Ukraine war and Russian soldiers’ mothersJennifer Mathers and Natasha Danilova
IGU,documents,International Gas Union,lobby,lobbying,sustainable finance taxonomy,green gas,EU,COP ‘Gaslighting’ Europe on fossil fuelsFaye Holder
Schengen,Fortress Europe,Romania,Bulgaria Romania and Bulgaria stuck in EU’s second tierMagdalena Ulceluse
income inequality,inequality,Gini,1 per cent,elephant chart,elephant Global income inequality: time to revise the elephantBranko Milanovic
Orbán,Hungary,Russia,Putin,sanctions,European Union,EU,European Parliament,commission,funds,funding Time to confront Europe’s rogue state—HungaryStephen Pogány

Most Recent Posts

reality check,EU foreign policy,Russia Russia’s invasion of Ukraine—a reality check for the EUHeidi Mauer, Richard Whitman and Nicholas Wright
permanent EU investment fund,Recovery and Resilience Facility,public investment,RRF Towards a permanent EU investment fundPhilipp Heimberger and Andreas Lichtenberger
sustainability,SDGs,Finland Embedding sustainability in a government programmeJohanna Juselius
social dialogue,social partners Social dialogue must be at the heart of Europe’s futureClaes-Mikael Ståhl
Jacinda Ardern,women,leadership,New Zealand What it means when Jacinda Ardern calls timePeter Davis

Other Social Europe Publications

front cover scaled Towards a social-democratic century?
Cover e1655225066994 National recovery and resilience plans
Untitled design The transatlantic relationship
Women Corona e1631700896969 500 Women and the coronavirus crisis
sere12 1 RE No. 12: Why No Economic Democracy in Sweden?

ETUI advertisement

The EU recovery strategy: a blueprint for a more Social Europe or a house of cards?

This new ETUI paper explores the European Union recovery strategy, with a focus on its potentially transformative aspects vis-à-vis European integration and its implications for the social dimension of the EU’s socio-economic governance. In particular, it reflects on whether the agreed measures provide sufficient safeguards against the spectre of austerity and whether these constitute steps away from treating social and labour policies as mere ‘variables’ of economic growth.


DOWNLOAD HERE

Eurofound advertisement

Eurofound webinar: Making telework work for everyone

Since 2020 more European workers and managers have enjoyed greater flexibility and autonomy in work and are reporting their preference for hybrid working. Also driven by technological developments and structural changes in employment, organisations are now integrating telework more permanently into their workplace.

To reflect on these shifts, on 6 December Eurofound researchers Oscar Vargas and John Hurley explored the challenges and opportunities of the surge in telework, as well as the overall growth of telework and teleworkable jobs in the EU and what this means for workers, managers, companies and policymakers.


WATCH THE WEBINAR HERE

Foundation for European Progressive Studies Advertisement

The winter issue of the Progressive Post magazine from FEPS is out!

The sequence of recent catastrophes has thrust new words into our vocabulary—'polycrisis', for example, even 'permacrisis'. These challenges have multiple origins, reinforce each other and cannot be tackled individually. But could they also be opportunities for the EU?

This issue offers compelling analyses on the European health union, multilateralism and international co-operation, the state of the union, political alternatives to the narrative imposed by the right and much more!


DOWNLOAD HERE

Hans Böckler Stiftung Advertisement

The macroeconomic effects of re-applying the EU fiscal rules

Against the background of the European Commission's reform plans for the Stability and Growth Pact (SGP), this policy brief uses the macroeconometric multi-country model NiGEM to simulate the macroeconomic implications of the most relevant reform options from 2024 onwards. Next to a return to the existing and unreformed rules, the most prominent options include an expenditure rule linked to a debt anchor.

Our results for the euro area and its four biggest economies—France, Italy, Germany and Spain—indicate that returning to the rules of the SGP would lead to severe cuts in public spending, particularly if the SGP rules were interpreted as in the past. A more flexible interpretation would only somewhat ease the fiscal-adjustment burden. An expenditure rule along the lines of the European Fiscal Board would, however, not necessarily alleviate that burden in and of itself.

Our simulations show great care must be taken to specify the expenditure rule, such that fiscal consolidation is achieved in a growth-friendly way. Raising the debt ceiling to 90 per cent of gross domestic product and applying less demanding fiscal adjustments, as proposed by the IMK, would go a long way.


DOWNLOAD HERE

ILO advertisement

Global Wage Report 2022-23: The impact of inflation and COVID-19 on wages and purchasing power

The International Labour Organization's Global Wage Report is a key reference on wages and wage inequality for the academic community and policy-makers around the world.

This eighth edition of the report, The Impact of inflation and COVID-19 on wages and purchasing power, examines the evolution of real wages, giving a unique picture of wage trends globally and by region. The report includes evidence on how wages have evolved through the COVID-19 crisis as well as how the current inflationary context is biting into real wage growth in most regions of the world. The report shows that for the first time in the 21st century real wage growth has fallen to negative values while, at the same time, the gap between real productivity growth and real wage growth continues to widen.

The report analysis the evolution of the real total wage bill from 2019 to 2022 to show how its different components—employment, nominal wages and inflation—have changed during the COVID-19 crisis and, more recently, during the cost-of-living crisis. The decomposition of the total wage bill, and its evolution, is shown for all wage employees and distinguishes between women and men. The report also looks at changes in wage inequality and the gender pay gap to reveal how COVID-19 may have contributed to increasing income inequality in different regions of the world. Together, the empirical evidence in the report becomes the backbone of a policy discussion that could play a key role in a human-centred recovery from the different ongoing crises.


DOWNLOAD HERE

About Social Europe

Our Mission

Article Submission

Membership

Advertisements

Legal Disclosure

Privacy Policy

Copyright

Social Europe ISSN 2628-7641

Social Europe Archives

Search Social Europe

Themes Archive

Politics Archive

Economy Archive

Society Archive

Ecology Archive

Follow us

RSS Feed

Follow us on Facebook

Follow us on Twitter

Follow us on LinkedIn

Follow us on YouTube