Maybe it’s the result of having moved to Europe with a North American point of view, but it has always stunned me that Europe’s nations – crammed together into an elbow of a landmass – could ever think of their sort as anything but inextricably linked. Regardless of what river, mountain range or narrow channel of water their borders run along, anything but a united Europe will be a plaything in a world split between the unchallenged economic power of the US and China.
Emmanuel Macron understands this. It’s why he’s often at his most prescient and convincing when he talks about Europe. As far as a vision for Europe goes, the first speech he gave at the Sorbonne won me over in 2017; when he returned in late April this year for Europe Speech 2.0, I once again found myself agreeing with his calls for greater European federalism.
But in the 9 June European elections, in which I have a vote – my first ever as a French and European citizen – I’m not sure that I’ll vote for the French president’s party, Renaissance. First, because I’m not sure that Macron, the object of so much domestic division, is well-placed to bring France along with him for all the ways that Europe urgently needs to evolve. And second, because France desperately needs a left wing that is genuinely committed to the European project. The 9 June poll is a chance for that French left to reassert itself (to “take back control”, if you will) by regrouping behind Raphaël Glucksmann.
At 44, two years younger than Macron, Glucksmann has made his mark as an MEP by being vocal about the need for European integration as essential to accelerating the green transition, promoting human rights globally and solidifying democracy against authoritarianism. To his credit, support for these things goes deeper than his career in electoral politics. As a young journalist, Glucksmann made a 2004 documentary, Tuez-les tous!, about France’s role in the Rwandan genocide, and he was in Kyiv for the 2013 Euromaidan protests. Perhaps his long experience with Ukraine is why Glucksmann has always been clear-eyed about the danger Vladimir Putin poses to Europe as a whole. And in the context of rising illiberalism across the political spectrum, he has cut ties with the far-left firebrand Jean-Luc Mélenchon.
The downside of what Macron accomplished in 2017 and held together in 2022 –uniting the mainstream left and right under the banner of radical centrism – is that it has reinforced the horseshoe theory of politics fuelling an even more radical opposition on the far left and far right. (It certainly didn’t help that after his 2017 election, Macron quickly and repeatedly stepped into an easy caricature of himself as arrogant and lacking empathy.)
No country can long sustain a politics that has become extractive, where a significant chunk of its political class seeks destruction in the hopes of one day ruling over the rubble. In the US, one half plays this game unilaterally against the other half; in France, both poles of the horseshoe have played it against the centre.
We know what the far-right vision for Europe is: hostility to immigrants, a lack of green investment and regulation, open season for illiberal leaders to erode the rule of law, judicial independence and a free press, and a far more friendly turn towards the Kremlin. By retreating behind the useful youth of 28-year-old Jordan Bardella, Marine Le Pen has achieved ever-increasing normalisation for the National Rally, which now leads pre-election polls with 32% of the vote.
And the far left, under Mélenchon’s leadership, has spent the past two years helping to do her job. The French are more afraid of seeing Mélenchon in power than they are Le Pen.
Mélenchon has cast a solid left-Eurosceptic shadow over French politics. Glucksmann has a chance to change that by convincingly marking the argument that many of the left’s priorities – a wealth tax, public contracting with local producers, reorganising subsidies to farmers around regenerative agriculture, protecting strict climate regulations, massive green investment in everything from renewables to affordable train travel – only make real sense at a European level.
With 14% of French voters supporting Glucksmann’s party, Place Publique, there is a significant portion of the French electorate that doesn’t fully align with Macron domestically, but that wants none of the Euroscepticism Mélenchon is offering, and that has come to Glucksmann from both Macron’s camp (on 17% support) and Mélenchon’s (on 7%). These voters understand that in the face of behemoth economies like China and the US, and unflinching aggression from Putin, sovereignty is nothing if not European. They desire greater integration in order to have real impact on the climate crisis and ecology, and they know that Europe’s strongest global lever of influence on behalf of both is access – or not – to its single market.
Elections often involve some amount of tug-of-war between a strategic vote and a heartfelt one. But on 9 June, for the first time since the very first vote I ever cast (for Barack Obama, in 2008), my vote for Raphaël Glucksmann will be both a vote of strategy and a vote de coeur.
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Alexander Hurst is a Guardian Europe columnist