France’s socialist rising star reveals EU elections manifesto

The French Socialist Party is going into the EU elections with a manifesto based on the war in Ukraine, a green transition, social justice and institutional reform, the party’s EU election list leader Raphaël Glucksmann, who has recently been rising in the polls, unveiled at a press conference Wednesday.

Glucksmann only managed to list a fraction of the 337 policy proposals he intends to carry through during his oncoming legislative mandate.

“There are moments in history that define the destinies of peoples, and even civilisations,” Glucksmann said at the start of a press conference on Wednesday, adding that he hopes to give the EU “the clear direction” it needs amid “such times of change”.

Addressing the war in Ukraine, which he said is “the reality that Europe is immediately faced with”, Glucksmann calls for the control of the €206 billion in frozen Russian assets seized so far to be redistributed to Kyiv, while also supporting the creation of a €100 billion Ukraine fund.

“It’s not too late” for the military situation in Ukraine to change course, he said, while acknowledging that Europeans were too slow to react, failing “to stand up to History” when war broke out in 2022.

In his speech, Glucksmann also addressed the issue of energy independence, stressing the urgency of weaning off Russian gas and all fossil fuels, coupled with issuing a new round of joint EU debt to finance green investments, taxing the richest Europeans, and extending the Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism to all goods and services produced in ways that violate EU rules.

A complete overhaul of the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) is also something being championed by Glucksman, who, besides wanting to implement a pricing floor for all farmers, also wants to eliminate financial aid “based on employment levels and ecological benefits”.

According to him, the ultimate aim is to move “from a continent of consumers to a continent of producers”.

Glucksmann also said that everyone in the Socialists & Democrats (S&D) EU group was on board to ensure that their priorities at the start of the mandate would be to push for a “Marshall Plan” to encourage households to undertake green renovations and create the so-called “most-favoured-nation clause,” which would require the most favourable national policies for women to be replicated at EU level.

The rising star of the French Socialists also said he wanted to scrap the EU’s unanimity rule while giving the European Parliament the right to legislate, saying it would help the bloc “resist the offensive of authoritarian regimes”.

Under heavy fire

With just over three weeks to go before the EU elections, Glucksmann is on a roll in the polls.

While his party list is currently polling at 15%, putting it on a par with Macron’s camp – which saw a drop from 19% in January – it is still far behind the far-right Rassemblement national’s 31.5%, according to a Toluna-Harris Interactive poll published on Wednesday.

Glucksmann’s meteoric rise has not gone unnoticed. He has even attracted strong criticism from both the far-left La France Insoumise (LFI), which sees him as nothing more than a “fake Macron,” and the pro-Macron list, which wants to make him appear more left-wing than he actually claims to be.

“Glucksmann thrives on the weakness of his competitors,” political scientist Brice Teinturier wrote in an analysis piece in Le Monde in late April.

Undecided left-wing voters may indeed turn to Glucksmann and abandon the LFI, especially as the media interventions of the party and its figurehead, Jean-Luc Méenchon, have mostly been about Gaza, ignoring other more European issues.

Meanwhile, pro-EU centrists who backed Macron in 2017 are shifting to Glucksmann in a sign of deep disagreement with a number of reforms seen as too liberal, notably the pension reform that Macron bypassed parliament to push through.

(Theo Bourgery-Gonse | Euractiv.fr)

Read more with Euractiv