European elections: Raphaël Glucksmann, the man of Ukraine

With 14% in the polls, Raphaël Glucksmann, the leader of the Socialist Party (PS) list, is making the defence of Ukraine the priority of his campaign, while remaining more nuanced on other international crises, such as the war in Gaza.

“He’s a freedom fighter” Batu Kutelia is quick to say, describing how much he appreciates his friend Raphaël. Former Georgian ambassador to the United States from 2011 to 2013, Batu Kutelia got to know Raphaël Glucksmann when the latter was an advisor to Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili, at the turn of the 2010s. “He was helping us seek support from the West after the 2008 war with Russia.”

Son of the French philosopher André Glucksmann, born into a privileged and cosmopolitan background near Paris, Raphaël Glucksmann spent a long time navigating between humanitarian work and journalism, before becoming a “revolution consultant”, as he joked in an article in Le Monde in spring 2014. At the time, he was based in Ukraine, writing speeches for Vitali Klitschko, the boxer who became one of the leaders of the Maïdan Square demonstrators and then mayor of Kyiv.

“Raphaël Glucksmann quickly became aware of Vladimir Putin’s martial intentions and his ability to destabilise the republics of the former USSR, that wanted to emancipate themselves from Russian colonial control,” notes journalist Régis Genté, an expert on the Caucasus.

Supporting Ukraine to the end

To the point of making the EU’s unwavering support for Kyiv one of the central planks of its campaign for the European elections. Among the measures proposed are the requisitioning of the €206 billion in frozen Russian public assets to be allocated to helping the Ukrainian resistance, and the setting up of a €100 billion fund “to invest in Europe’s defence industries.”

His opponents on the left criticise his ‘warmongering’ stance, which benefits arms dealers. Others reproach him for his years of companionship with Mikheil Saakashvili, considered an “Atlanticist and neo-liberal” president, who has been imprisoned since 2021 in his own country, officially for “abuse of power”.

These accusations are echoed by the Rassemblement National (RN) and its list leader Jordan Bardella, who regularly denounces the socialist candidate as “the conduit for foreign interests in the European Parliament.”

By focusing his campaign on international solidarity and human rights, Raphaël Glucksmann “has nonetheless retained the markers that made up the identity of the Socialist Party,” notes Pierre-Nicolas Baudot, a doctor in political science and specialist in the Socialist Party.

“He is taking advantage of the space that has opened up between Renaissance, which is caught up in national issues, and France Insoumise, whose foreign policy options are struggling to convince people,” continues the researcher.

In an interview with Euractiv, the head of the LFI list, Manon Aubry, called for negotiations to be opened with Vladimir Putin, and recommended the deployment of United Nations peacekeeping forces to protect Ukraine’s nuclear power stations.

Interviewed on LCI on 12 May, she caused controversy by explaining that the Russian army “had not marched on Kyiv,” while fighting was raging in the spring of 2022 in the suburbs of the Ukrainian capital.

“We all voted in favour of aid to Ukraine,” underlines Member of the European Parliament (MEP) Emmanuel Maurel, standing on the Communist list this year.

“But there are issues on which we have real differences with Raphaël Glucksmann. We are against the enlargement of the European Union to include Ukraine and against lifting the unanimity requirement within the European Council for the Common Foreign and Security Policy (CFSP).”

While Raphaël Glucksmann is very vocal about supporting Ukraine, his position is more nuanced on the war in Gaza. He regularly calls for mobilisation to “prevent the carnage”, but refuses to use the term genocide to describe the ongoing massacres, setting himself apart from other left-wing politicians, such as Communist Party (PC) leader Fabien Roussel, or Insoumis leader Jean-Luc Mélenchon.

At the end of April, Raphaël Glucksmann also took the view that the management of Sciences Po Paris school had “the right to evacuate” pro-Palestine activists blockading the building, in contradiction with the first secretary of the French Socialist Party (PS), Olivier Faure, who considered the intervention of the forces of order “catastrophic”.

However, Glucksmann’s views on Ukraine seem to resonate with voters in a European Election where international issues are in the spotlight. For Philippe Marlière, professor of political science at University College London, “the voters who will go and vote for Raphaël Glucksmann are former PS members who went over to Mélenchon and Macron during the 2017 debacle, and who are in the process of coming back.”

[Edited by Rajnish Singh]