Macron’s gamble fails: new MEPs start chipping away at green agenda

Following a poor performance by his party in last month’s European election, French President Emmanuel Macron called a snap election, gambling that French voters would give his party a fresh mandate rather than back far-right candidates for parliament.

The first round of the election was held last week and it is clear that his gamble has not paid off, with the National Rally (formerly the National Front) coming first after getting 33% of the vote. Under French election rules, there will be a second round of votes on Sunday, 7 July, in which run-off votes will be held among candidates who got more than 12.5% of the vote in each constituency in the first round.

Any candidate who got more than 50% of the votes in the first round were deemed elected – 76 of the 577 available seats have already been filled this way.

After the first round there were 311 seats heading for three or four-way run-offs. However, many centre or left candidates dropped out in order to concentrate opposition to the National Rally and prevent that party gaining a parliamentary majority. The risk here is that the remaining candidate will often be from the hard-left France Unbowed movement, led by Jean-Luc Mélechon.

Latest projections show that the most likely outcome will be a hung parliament, where no single party or alliance has a majority of seats. There is a risk that a parliament of extremes from both the left and right of politics would be unworkable, and that another election could be called if even a minority government cannot be formed.

Results of the election will be out in the hours after voting closes, as counting is generally completed very quickly.

Meanwhile in Brussels

The recently elected members of the European Parliament are getting down to business, with a vote on the re-election of Ursula von der Leyen as Commission president among the early agenda issues. Should she gain support from the three main centrist blocs, she would have sufficient support, but there are risks to that as not all national delegations are guaranteed to back her. That vote is scheduled for 18 July.

Away from the parliament building the largest grouping of MEPs – the European People’s Party – is meeting to set its priorities for the parliamentary term. The group wants, as a priority, to postpone the implementation of the EU’s anti-deforestation law.

The law, which was passed in April of last year by a huge majority of MEPs, would force companies to show that products such as cocoa, coffee and cattle have not contributed to deforestation before they could be placed on the EU market.

The law is due to come into force at the end of this year, and while it still has strong support among environment ministers across the EU, reports suggest that more than 20 agriculture ministers who fear that their own farmers, who are also covered by the legislation, will face significant added bureaucracy from having to prove that their production has not been as the result of deforestation.

Comment

The rapid change in the political landscape in Europe may have far-reaching consequences for the agriculture industry. The protests earlier this year sent a message that farmers and food producers have had enough of added red-tape. The European elections saw support for Green Party candidates drop. In France we are seeing the rise of the candidates on the extremes of the right and left of politics.

Politicians are already taking the concerns raised more seriously, and while the moves to delay the implementation of the deforestation law may eventually prove to be futile, they do point to an almost certainty that introduction of any fresh environmental restrictions on the farming sector is much less likely in the coming EU term.

However, there is a warning to heed from the French election which is that, depending on what happens on Sunday, the changes in the political landscape are not going to run smoothly and could lead to some very messy outcomes.

In short