“Victory for freedom!” » Marine Le Pen exults. “Your cries of horror, your threats of apocalypse” did nothing about it: the “Spring of the Peoples” got up. Is it the evening of June 30 or July 7, 2024? No, June 23, 2016, after 51.9% of Britons voted yes to divorce from the European Union (EU). Emphatic, the then president of the National Front (future National Rally) “vibrates with the British who seized this extraordinary opportunity to escape from servitude” and predicts a domino effect: soon, it will be the turn of the French to “liberate” themselves from the EU.
Eight years later, figurehead of a revamped far-right party and flanked by Jordan Bardella, Mme Le Pen is careful not to refer to Brexit, which she nevertheless considered in 2016 as “the most important historical event [en Europe] since the fall of the Berlin Wall”. The economic and political disaster which followed the departure of the EU has transformed Brexit into a foil: in the United Kingdom, where Labor Keir Starmer, the announced big winner of the legislative elections on July 4, never refers to it; and in France, where the National Rally (RN) has swallowed its promise of Frexit, while multiplying promises incompatible with remaining in the EU.
So here are the former French Brexit champions on the threshold of power, a dramatic moment in French political history whose blatant analogies with the shock of 2016 for the British appear heavy with lessons for the French. No more than the legislative elections of June 30 and July 7, the referendum of June 23, 2016 was an inevitability. Both are the result of the hubris of a man cynical enough to put the future of his country at stake: David Cameron on one side, Emmanuel Macron on the other. A bluff in the case of the British Prime Minister, who had launched the idea of a referendum to calm the right wing of the Conservative Party, tempted by the Europhobe Nigel Farage, thinking he would never have to organize one, before being trapped by his promise. A gamble for the French President, victim of the boomerang effect of his surprise announcement.
False promises
But the parallels do not end there. Hostility to immigration, seen as being helped by EU membership, was one of the most powerful factors in the British vote, as was a sense of abandonment linked to the disintegration of public services and the precariousness of work. The mass of false promises – including Boris Johnson’s red campaign bus slogan promising to fund the public health system with money “saved” from the EU – summed up in the phrase “Take back control” (“take back control”), is also not unrelated to the RN’s expensive, discriminatory and unfunded program.
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