President cracks the whip as his campaign stutters amid a widening gap between centrists and the far right.

French President Emmanuel Macron is turning up the heat on his lieutenants ahead of the European election as the far-right National Rally continues to build on its seemingly unstoppable momentum.

Macron’s game plan ahead of the EU election for tackling the National Rally’s unrelenting rise was to dramatize the fight against the far-right party, emphasizing the clash of ideologies and the Russian threat, according to several French officials. The twin aim was to beat abstention and mobilize Macron’s own voters, and also dissuade voters from turning to rival pro-European candidates such as the Socialist Raphaël Glucksmann and the ecologists.

But several weeks into the campaign, the strategy has failed to deliver, according to recent polls, and alarm bells are starting to ring. A recent study by IFOP put the far right, led by National Rally President Jordan Bardella, at 30 percent of the vote vs. 21 percent for Macron’s Renew coalition, with Glucksmann polling at 11 percent.

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    8 months ago

    This is the best summary I could come up with:

    PARIS  — French President Emmanuel Macron is turning up the heat on his lieutenants ahead of the European election as the far-right National Rally continues to build on its seemingly unstoppable momentum.

    Macron’s game plan ahead of the EU election for tackling the National Rally’s unrelenting rise was to dramatize the fight against the far-right party, emphasizing the clash of ideologies and the Russian threat, according to several French officials.

    This month, the lead candidate of Macron’s Renaissance party Valérie Hayer compared the far-right leader Marine Le Pen with Edouard Daladier, the pre-war French PM who signed the 1938 Munich agreement with Hitler.

    Francois Bayrou, a French centrist and one of Macron’s earliest supporters, has said the far right shouldn’t be “the only topic of the campaign,” adding that it was “a gift” to focus so much attention on the National Rally

    “We need to insist on our European credibility and send press the idea that we succeeded on many issues” such as the EU’s common agricultural policy, border agency Frontex and the Green Deal, he said.

    In the process, the French president risked splitting his coalition to pass a bill meant to showcase his increasingly hard line on illegal immigration and siphon away voters from the right and far right.

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