Political Reporter on Barnier’s conservatism, that ’tilts to the right’ : is a well established fact?
Headline: French PM Barnier’s still-to-be-approved government tilts to the right
Sub-headline: Michel Barnier handed President Macron his cabinet line-up on Thursday. According to the prime minister’s office, the government will be officially appointed before Sunday.
These initial elements show that Barnier has drawn on the former majority and on the right to make his selection. While the prime minister claims to be representing a “break” with the previous government, his team’s profile bears a striking resemblance to the previous one, being essentially made up of Macronists and LR elected representatives. This composition confirms the right-wing direction of Macron’s administration. The only difference with previous governments since his 2017 election is that this time, the alliance between the presidential camp and the right is fully asserted.
The absence of figures from the left-wing Nouveau Front Populaire (NFP) alliance, for the moment, contributes to the impression of imbalance in the new team, even though the NFP came out on top in the second round of legislative elections. “In France, under Macron, it’s all the losers of the last elections who are going to make up the government,” denounced Manuel Bompard on X. The top official in the radical left La France Insoumise party then called for demonstrations on September 21, “everywhere in France against the biggest scam of the Fifth Republic.”
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Have @gatinois4 & @alexandrepedro willfully forgotten this from The Telegraph of September 9, 2021?
Headline: Michel Barnier demands return of France’s ‘sovereignty’ from European courts
Sub-headline: Former EU negotiator accused of hypocrisy by Brexiteers after attack on European Court of Justice
Michel Barnier said that France had to regain the sovereignty it has lost to European courts on Thursday and called for a referendum on a ban on non-EU immigration.
The former Brexit negotiator and EU commissioner was accused of hypocrisy because his comments appeared to contradict many of the positions he took when he was helming talks with the UK.
During the Brexit negotiations, Mr Barnier, who is running to be French president for the centre-Right Republicains party, called for the European Court of Justice to continue to hold sway in the UK and insisted it remained the sole and supreme arbiter of EU law.
He also secured British commitments that the UK would remain part of the European Court of Human Rights, which is not an EU institution, in return for cooperation on extradition after Brexit.
Mr Barnier said at a rally, “We must regain our legal sovereignty so that we are no longer subject to the rulings of the European Court of Justice or the European Court of Human Rights.”
“We will propose a referendum in September on the issue of immigration,” he said, referring to his earlier call for a halt on non-EU immigration into France for five years.
Freedom of movement, which is open to EU nationals in the bloc, would continue under his proposal, which would stop all non-EU residency permit requests for three to five years except asylum seekers and students.
Mr Barnier later tweeted a clarification saying that France should not break entirely free of the European courts but only have a “constituional shield” on matters to do with non-EU immigration.
“This is ironic in the extreme. Barnier preaching the merits of national sovereignty to curb the over-powerful EU and European Court of Human Rights,” tweeted Simon Clarke, the Tory MP for Middlesbrough South and East Cleveland.
Nigel Farage, the former Brexit Party leader, told the Telegraph Mr Barnier was the “biggest hypocrite ever born” for co-opting eurosceptic arguments after working for the EU for so long.
Mr Barnier also took aim at the Franco-German relationship at the heart of EU policy making. He said that the relationship was unbalanced by a dominant Berlin and France needed to reassert itself.
Ursula von der Leyen, the woman chosen ahead of Mr Barnier to be European Commission president, is German.
Mr Barnier stands little chance of being elected ahead of either the pro-EU incumbent Emmanuel Macron or the eurosceptic, anti-migrant National Rally’s Marine Le Pen in the presidential election next year.
After many years working for the European Commission in Brussels, his profile is not as high as his rivals and his Republicains have not recovered from their mauling at the last presidential elections.
Since announcing he would run for the presidency, Mr Barnier has made a pitch for votes from people who feel disenfranchised by globalisation.
Rootless cosmopolitan,down at heels intellectual;would be writer.
'Polemic is a discourse of conflict, whose effect depends on a delicate balance between the requirements of truth and the enticements of anger, the duty to argue and the zest to inflame. Its rhetoric allows, even enforces, a certain figurative licence. Like epitaphs in Johnson’s adage, it is not under oath.'
https://www.lrb.co.uk/v15/n20/perry-anderson/diary
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