The Prime Minister of France has warned his people that any form of Frexit would leave them weeping into their pastis. ‘Don’t be like the British who cried after Brexit,’ said Gabriel Attal, in a radio interview on Thursday. ‘A large majority of British people regret Brexit and sometimes regret not turning out to vote, or voting for something that was negative for their country.’
Attal then cited a couple of examples of this negativity; what he described as ‘massive economic difficulties’ and more ‘illegal immigration than ever’.
Attal’s Brexit bashing is an indication of the panic spreading through the ruling party
The man described as a ‘mini-Macron’ has clearly inherited some of his master’s animus towards Brexit. In 2021 the president of France described the Leave vote as the result of ‘lies and false promises.’
Attal’s Brexit bashing is an indication of the panic spreading through the ruling party. The European elections are just over a week away, and Macron’s candidate, Valerie Hayer, is stuck on 16 per cent in the polls, half that of the frontrunner, Jordan Bardella, of Marine Le Pen’s National Rally.
Macron and mini-Macron have tried every trick in the book in recent weeks to ward voters off the National Rally: they have warned of the party’s closeness to Putin, its closeness to Trump, its closeness to fascism. None of the scare-mongering has worked. So Attal has played his last card. The party’s closeness to Brexit.
There is a slight problem. Marine Le Pen long ago renounced ‘Frexit’. Indeed, her former vice-president, Florian Philippot, was on the radio on Thursday, criticising Le Pen for toning down her hostility towards Brussels.
Philippot remains a committed Leaver, with Nigel Farage his role model, and his Patriots party is the party of Frexit in the European elections.
Le Pen removed Frexit from her manifesto after her 2018 rebranding of her party when she changed its name from National Front to National Rally. She concluded that Frexit put the frighteners on too many voters, and so she redefined her position as one of remaining and changing the EU from within.
This is still sacrilege for Attal, a technocrat from top to toe who shares his president’s canine devotion to the EU. Should the National Rally ever gain influence within Brussels, warned Attal, they ‘could have the capacity to block European institutions, which would lead to very dangerous consequences for our country.’
Attal’s claims about Britain being a basket case went unchallenged by his interviewer. It’s true that John Bull isn’t in the best of health economically, but France isn’t exactly booming. On Friday Ratings agency S&P downgraded France’s credit score from AA to AA-. It’s the first time it has downgraded France since 2013, and it did so because of a deterioration in the country’s budgetary position. According to the IMF, Britain’s GDP will grow by 0.5 per cent in 2024 and by 1.5 per cent in 2025; France’s will grow by 0.7 per cent in 2024 and 1.4 per cent in 2025. Germany’s growth forecast for 2024 is 0.2 per cent.
As for illegal immigration, in 2023 just under 30,000 crossed the Channel in small boats, a 36 per cent drop on the previous year. In Britain, the problem is more with legal migration than the illegal variety. There were over one million legal entrants in 2022 and 2023, after the Tory party promised to take back control of the country’s borders.
France also has huge numbers of migrants coming legally to France – 323,000 in 2023, an increase of 100,000 on the 2016 figure, the year before Macron came to power. But it also has record numbers of migrants claiming asylum; in 2023 there were 142,500 requests, an 8 per cent increase on 2022.
In parallel with the soaring number of migrants arriving in France, there has also been a marked increase in crime. As one of Macron’s MPs admitted this week, ‘there is sometimes a link between insecurity and immigration’.
Last year a total of 380,000 migrants arrived illegally in the EU, the highest number since 2016, but that figure could be challenged this year as the summer brings more stable sailing conditions.
Figures leaked this week from the French interior ministry revealed that in the first five months of 2024 more than 72,000 migrants have arrived in the EU. The true number is probably higher as this total accounts only for those detected. Spain has overtaken Italy as the most popular destination for migrants, with a 185 per cent increase in arrivals this year compared to the same period last year.
France’s interior ministry also reported that the migrant situation on the Channel coast remains ‘very tense’. There have been 522 crossings so far this year from France to England, totalling 18,659 migrants. This is an increase of 35 per cent compared with the same period last year.
Reading such figures, Rishi Sunak might feel tempted to ask for a rebate on the £500 million he handed to Macron in March last year. The money was supposed to be used by the French to stop the small boats crossing the Channel.
Trump, Putin and Farage are all convenient bogeymen but the man most responsible for the rising popularity of Le Pen is the man in the Élysée. He’s failed in his seven years in office to get a grip on mass immigration, or insecurity, and the country’s public debt out of control while the cost of living crisis shows no sign of easing.
It’s enough to make a grown French man cry.
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