EU migration pact centre-stage for Macron’s camp in bid to counter far-right

French President Emmanuel Macron’s Besoin d’Europe coalition has upped support for a new pact on migration and asylum, emphasising a desire to tackle illegal immigration and fend off the far-right narrative ahead of June’s EU elections.

The Asylum and Migration Pact, scheduled for a final plenary vote in the European Parliament on Wednesday, will revamp the EU’s governance framework on migration policy, streamline asylum processes across the bloc, and better control the continent’s external borders.

It marks the outcome of some 10 years’ worth of negotiations following the 2015 refugee influx as a result of the war in Syria.

The pact establishes a novel ‘filtering’ mechanism for irregular migrants at the border to speed up the processing of asylum claims.

The deal also establishes a compulsory ‘solidarity’ scheme through which EU member states facing ‘migration pressures’ can ask migrants to relocate to other EU countries or demand extra financial support for border infrastructure.

Bank on the migration pact

The pact, which includes nine pieces of legislation, strikes a balance between “humanism, which translates in greater solidarity and protection of migrants’ fundamental rights, and a firmness which is indispensable to securing our borders,” Fabienne Keller, a French Renew member of the European Parliament (MEP) who spearheaded negotiations, told journalists on Monday.

Finding the middle ground between solidarity and border control is at the very heart of the deal, she added — and Renew is due to vote in favour almost unanimously.

But there is more to the vote than meets the eye: French President Emmanuel Macron’s Besoin d’Europe coalition is ready to make full use of the pact to counter the far-right Rassemblement National’s (RN) anti-immigration narrative and showcase that they act seriously on migration policy.

It also comes as Besoin d’Europe is losing momentum in the polls ahead of EU elections, topping out at 16.5% in the latest series of polls — an almost three percentage point drop from January — and trailing far behind the RN’s 30% lead, posing as the main opposition party to Macron.

“We’re going to move forward and (capitalise) on this issue because it is of interest to French voters,” Pieyre-Alexandre Anglade, a French MP and campaign director to Valérie Hayer, Besoin d’Europe’s top candidate, told journalists.

The RN has long established itself as a vocal anti-immigration party, and said it would vote against the pact, which in their eyes “is not against further immigration, but in favour of it,” Jordan Bardella, its lead candidate, told French weekly Le Journal du Dimanche.

As things stand, French Renew MEPs are to be the only ones, across the country’s political spectrum, to vote in favour of the pact — in the name of “EU responsibility.”

“Those who oppose (the pact) today are weakening the EU project,” Anglade said, hinting that the post-election Parliamentary makeup is likely to veer more right than it is today, making this agreement harder to reach under a new legislature.

“We’re ready to bank on the vote to be audible on migration issues,” a party source told Euractiv under the condition of anonymity.

There’s also pressure among left-leaning party officials and national MPs within Besoin d’Europe to repair the reputational damages of the December’s immigration bill adoption in the French Parliament with far-right votes, the content of which would have severely curtailed migrants’ access to citizenship, rights to social benefits, and family reunification procedures – had a large portion of it not been deemed anti-constitutional.

French socialists and conservatives breaking ranks

It’s not just the far-right Renew is pointing fingers at and hoping to undermine.

While most of the right-leaning European People’s Party (EPP) and their left-wing Socialists & Democrats (S&D) counterparts should vote in favour of the deal, the French delegations are expected to break ranks and cast a negative vote.

“The initial intentions of the deal are good, but they were done away with because of caveats added by the left,” Les Républicains lead candidate François-Xavier Bellamy said last month.

The deal just doesn’t go far enough for the French centre-right, who call for a French constitutional reform to break away from EU legislation on immigration matters, push for more stringent border controls, and hope for a national immigration referendum.

The delegation will agree on a final position on Wednesday, just hours before the vote.

Meanwhile, the French socialists’ lead candidate, Raphaël Glucksmann, will vote against a majority of the package, and he should bring the rest of the delegation with him, an S&D group advisor told Euractiv.

“This packaged deal is really bad,” Sylvie Guillaume, a French socialist MEP in charge of the file, told Euractiv. It fails to respond to the most pressing issues, she said, such as migrants’ deaths in the Mediterranean Sea (over 2,500 lives were lost in 2023)  and setting safe and legal routes.

And so, Macron’s camp finds itself in a unique position, being the only ones in support of the deal, and coalition officials are clear they’ll use the file to show just how serious they are on immigration — while claiming others are not.

(Theo Bourgery-Gonse | Euractiv.fr)

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