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The FN’s anti-EU reasoning and position has been relatively consistent since 1992. The party opposes the EU on democratic grounds, deeming the organization to be elitist and unresponsive in its day-to-day existence (the so-called “democratic deficit”) and to have been constructed in violation of the French referendum of 2005 rejecting the so-called “Constitutional Treaty.” More seriously still, the FN considers the EU to be a “Trojan horse of globalization”[5] which, through liberal-egalitarian norms and economic/migratory borderlessness, is destroying both French sovereignty and ultimately the French nation itself.
Marine Le Pen then demands a series of measures to restore French sovereignty:
- The superiority of French law over EU law.
- The organized dissolution of the Eurozone and the return of the French franc.
- The abolition of the Schengen Area of free movement of people and the restoration of French border controls.
- A nil net contribution to the EU budget (France currently pays in about 7 billion euros per year more than she receives back) and the replacement of the Common Agricultural Policy with a purely French one.
- A few symbolic measures, such as the removal of EU flags from all public buildings.
Florian Philippot, Le Pen’s media-savvy spin doctor and right-hand man, has said an FN government would explicitly emulate British Prime Minister David Cameron in demanding renegotiation of EU membership terms and then allowing the French people to decide whether to stay in via referendum. In the unlikely event that the EU would accept the above terms, the FN would actually campaign to stay in the Union. In practice, the FN’s terms are such that these measures could only mean the de facto abolition of the EU anyway and its reduction from an already weak confederation to an empty shell.[6]
The FN program however is not silent on the kind of “Europe of Nations”[7] it would like to see emerge. On the contrary, it proposes:
- strengthened European multilateral cooperation on aerospace and military-industrial “great projects” (some of which already exist: Airbus, Ariane, Galileo . . .), with expanded participation to include Russia;
- the creation of “a free association of European States who have the same vision and the same interests in areas such as immigration or the rules on external trade and capital flows,” again including Russia, but explicitly rejecting Turkey;[8]
- the reorientation of French foreign policy in general away from the United States of America and towards a non-aligned approach based on “a trilateral Paris-Berlin Moscow alliance.”[9]
Le Pen then proposes a simple program for European cooperation: No more dismal Brussels bureaucrats and Afro-Muslim colonizers, and more border fences and rocket ships. Europe’s future would then be one of continuing European Man’s long march towards the Space Age rather than regressing back to the Sub-Saharan Age[10] . . .
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FINES ET INITIA Headlines 