A controversial ECJ ruling has exposed the French elite to the difficulties of ever-closer union.
Source - Daily Telegraph - 20/07/21
You would be forgiven for thinking that the irate French politician thundering in the pages of Le Figaro against an “unacceptable” and “irresponsible” ruling of the European Court of Justice (ECJ), “an unbelievable and unbearable mistake” guilty of “disregarding the national sovereignty of France” from a court that “arrogates to itself a power that never was its own” was one of a rare breed of Frexiteers. (Jean-Frédéric Poisson, perhaps, or François Asselineau, who strive to poll one per cent each time the presidential election comes around then vanish for five years.)
But Jean-Louis Borloo, a former finance minister under Nicolas Sarkozy who also held cabinet positions under Jacques Chirac, is about the furthest you can find from the political fringe. Several times rated France’s favourite political personality, he was also an active environment minister and has long been the centrist mayor of Valenciennes, a northern city of the French rust belt, is no technocrat — he has always been perceived as more attuned to the concerns of ordinary people.
What made him so incensed was a ruling by the ECJ, despite considerable delaying tactics deployed by the French government, that the military within EU member states should be subjected to the Working Time Directive. In other words, French soldiers aren’t, er, soldiers; they are employees, and so subject to “individual timekeeping, severe limitations on night work, rigid activity planning including prior agreement from each individual to any change, precise calculation of time off, mandatory 11-hour daily rest time,” and on and on.
The Court was quick to respond that armies can derogate from working hours in deployment, special operations, or in cases of “insurmountable constraints”, but such caveats did nothing to placate Borloo, who spluttered that the ruling was “a frontal attack on the military spirit that undermines the esprit de corps forged through hard training and discipline.”
To say his salvo was uniformly well received would be a lie. Commenters called him a Gaullist manqué (no longer a compliment, especially on the centre-Left) and others suggested he join forces with Marine Le Pen (a proper insult among the punditry). But he did receive support from the Minister of Defence, the rather bland Florence Parly, and the government is likely to keep up the fight, both in domestic courts and at the EU level.
This is a sensitive area for Emmanuel Macron, who has already managed to lose two chiefs of the joint staff (one spectacularly fired and the other resigning). The Fifth Republic gives the President explicit authority over the armed forces, and, especially in an election year, he will have to reassure voters that he is able and willing to defy the EU when it threatens to impinge on French interests.
Souverainisme is still largely seen as a niche belief in France. Still, if I were planning Macron’s re-election campaign in the coming months, I’d be wary of waving as many blue and gold flags as last time. In 2017, it was a given that the more pro-European you went, the more mainstream.
But in today’s political and social fragmentation, reminded of what their country used to stand for, — the kind of narrative that has been painfully erased from school manuals and derided in the media — the French find inside themselves the stirrings of an old familiar tune, something reassuring and straighter, that they are not quite ready to jettison. For its part, the political class is increasingly finding the difference between “ever closer union” and French self-interest a tricky one to negotiate.
It is possible the ECJ has bitten off more than it can chew this time.
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