Michel barnier now heads the race to unseat macron | thearticle

Michel Barnier — Monsieur Brexit — the best known French politician other than President Macron in Britain, is pulling ahead of fellow centre-right former ministers in the race to become the

lead candidate for Les Républicains, the main centre-right party in France. Around 100,000 members of Les Républicains (LR) will chose their candidate next month. The party of Nicolas

Sarkozy and Jacques Chirac, the descendant of the RPF party set up by General de Gaulle, has been in the doldrums. First François Hollande and then Emmanuel Macron won the Elysée. Between

them they’ve kept the right out of power, denying it the huge levers of patronage that the French state bestows on its ruling elites. Would-be candidates had to get at least 250 signatures

of support from elected party officeholders. Michel Barnier has stormed ahead of his nearest rival with 702 endorsement signatures from 468 mayors in 80 per cent of French departments. He

also has the signatures of 62 deputies, more than half the total of LR parliamentarians. His rival, Xavier Bertrand, who is president of the Northern region of France managed 427 signatures.

Bertrand loudly walked out of the LR party, announcing he should automatically have the LR endorsement  as candidate. Now he has had to come crawling back and compete for the nomination.

The only woman, Valerie Pecresse, who is president of the Île de France region around Paris, got 250 signatures. Eric Ciotti, who is often found on radio and TV defending the deeply

unpleasant hard-right polemicist Eric Zemmour, who has become the favourite of the _Spectator_ in London despite his declared contempt for American and English “Anglo-Saxons”, managed only

400 endorsements. Nicolas Sarkozy appeared in court this week in Paris on yet more charges related to campaign finance. Bertrand, Pecresse, and Ciotti were all Sarkozy ministers who served

under the LR prime minister, François Fillon. In 2017, he had to stand down as the LR presidential candidate after revelations about parliamentary allowances paid to his Welsh-born wife. By

contrast, Michel Barnier, while always a  loyal RPF, then LR serviteur since he was elected as a Gaullist deputy aged 28, has never been tainted by sleaze accusations. He only served under

Sarkozy for two years as Agriculture Minister before going to Brussels as European Commissioner for the Internal Market 2010-2014. In opinion polls on voting intentions, Barnier does not

score quite as well as Bertrand or Pecresse, let alone Marine Le Pen or Eric Zemmour. But these polls are irrelevant. What matters is who emerges as the candidate for Les Républicains. In

this contest Barnier has leapt over his rivals. He is a youthful 70-year-old, kept fit by walking, climbing and biking in the alpine region of Savoie, where he first came to attention by

organising the 1992 winter Olympics. He does not tick the Macron or Hollande boxes of being a product of the elite French graduate schools like the École national d’administration. He makes

no claims to be a splashy intellectual or a permanent presence in the soirées of political Paris. Patronised by Jacques Chirac for his life-long pro-Europeanism, Barnier has held top

ministerial posts including Foreign Affairs and has twice been France’s choice to hold down a key European Commission portfolio. I had many long conversations with him when I was an FCO

minister and he was French foreign minister. French ministers have their own government planes serving the finest food and wine — though Barnier eats moderately and drinks little — while FCO

ministers are expected to use Ryanair or Easyjet. He always insisted to me he was a “social” Gaullist. This is an important distinction, rather like being a pro-union or pro-poor Tory, a

breed long extinct _chez nous_, though Prime Minister Johnson’s levelling up agenda has elements of social Gaullism in it. Barnier is the Joe Biden of French politics — unflashy, solid,

hugely experienced, dependable with appeal that extends beyond party allegiance. He comprehensively out-negotiated David Frost, Boris Johnson’s man in the Brexit treaty talks, with results

we see today as Britain wakes up to what the government’s very hard Brexit entails. But Barnier is also critical of aspects of what Brussels does. For some in the EU capital, that makes him

a traitor. But it plays well in France and after 50 years of solid pro-Europeanism Barnier’s reasoned criticism of some EU decisions is not the same as the anti-Europeanism of Marine Le Pen,

Eric Zemmour let alone Nigel Farage or Johnson. If he gets the LR nomination he will be Emmanuel Macron’s biggest threat.