Pod Save the World - What the hell is happening in France with Dr. Karen Donfried

Episode Date: April 26, 2017

Tommy talks with Europe expert Dr. Karen Donfried about the French Presidential elections and the rise of far-right nationalist candidates like Marine Le Pen. They also discuss the potential for Russian interference in France, comparisons to Trump and why the French presidency could have major implications for the US.

Welcome back to Pod Save the World. My guest today is Dr. Karen Donfried. She is the president of the German Marshall Fund of the United States. Before assuming this role in April of 2014, she was the special assistant to the president and senior director for European Affairs on the National Security Council. She has also served in a number of other roles. She was a national intelligence officer for Europe on the National Intelligence Council, which is the intelligence community center for strategic thinking. Before that, she was responsible for the Europe portfolio on the U.S. U.S. Department of State's policy planning staff and a number of other very impressive jobs. Karen, thank you so much for coming on POTS. of the World today. I really appreciate it. My pleasure, Tommy. So we were joking before we started recording that this election in France has done the impossible, which was get people interested in a foreign election in the United States, particularly the U.S. media. This past weekend, French voters went to the polls, and the New York Times described it as the country's most consequential election in modern history. And I would add, it might include one of the more divisive candidates in recent history.

Can you walk us through what happened this past weekend and who the candidates are? Absolutely. So my headline for the outcome of the election would be that the center held. That in many ways was a surprising outcome because of the twists and turns of this election cycle, where you actually saw candidates from the extremes prove to be very popular on the French political landscape. So the person who's gotten arguably the most press attention is Marine Le Pen. She is the head of the National Front, which is a far right party in France. She is deeply anti-EU, anti-European Union.

She was talking about taking France out of the European Union's single currency and potentially even leaving the European Union. Then the other main figure in this drama is Emmanuel Macron. He is, he represents the center. And in that sense, maybe you might think of him as an establishment figure, except he's not. He's never been elected to political office before. He started what he called a political member. movement just one year ago called en masse onward. And he rode that to the number one position

in the first round of the French election, which was on Sunday. Then you get to Fosso Fion, who was the candidate of the center-right party, notably Nate called the Republicans, though quite different from the Republicans here in the U.S. And he was the person everyone thought was going to win the first round until it came out that he had employed his wife and children paid them with French taxpayer euros, but it didn't seem that they actually had jobs. So he's now formally under investigation. So he only got 20% in this first round vote. The next largest vote getter was this flaming figure on the far left, Melanchon, who was using holograms to have more campaign appearances and YouTube. He was the oldest candidate in the race, but actually spoke to

younger, frustrated French. And then at 6% of the vote in the first round, you had the candidate of the socialist party, this second major party in French politics, the center left party. which happens to hold the presidency today. So it was remarkable to see these two major French parties not do well at all for the first time since Charles de Gaulle dominated French politics. It's great to hear that a country still cares about nepotism. There's a political cost there. So, you know, it's hard to imagine an election, a presidential election in the United States where neither the Democratic party or the Republican Party had a candidate competing in the general election. But isn't that

essentially what happened here in France? Is that as seismic a political event for the French as it would be for us? There is no question. It is a seismic event that you don't have a candidate from the center right or the center left in the second round of the presidential election. Now, what people are trying to unpack is how much of that has to do with individuals and how much of it has to do with political parties and their failure to galvanize people around a central message. And let's remember the individuals here. Cione, as we talked about, had this scandal. The socialist party, that center-left party, strikingly, Fonsois Hollande, the current French president, chose not to run for re-election.

And I believe he hit 4% popularity at one point in favorability ratings. So clearly the socialists were suffering from his low popularity, and it was very hard for Hamon, the socialist candidate, who wasn't a particularly charismatic figure in his own right, to in any way break through. What will be interesting, Tommy, is the presidential election is getting lots of attention, in part because of the concern around Marine Le Pen possibly winning. But there are also parliamentary elections that France will have in June. And those will be interesting because the president, if he or she does not have a majority in parliament, will have a tough time getting through his or her agenda. And that will also tell us something about the strength of those traditional parties in France. So right now there's still a vibrant debate about, you know, is it that these

political parties are hopeless and you'll see a complete reconstruction of the French political party landscape, or is it that they have particularly weak candidates this time? We're down to a runoff between your pronunciation is so much better than mine. Le Pen and Macron, can you talk a little bit about their parties, especially the National Front Party, which is a pretty sordid history that I feel like has gotten attention, but I think might still be shocking to some people in the U.S. So Marine Le Pen now leads a party, the National Front, that was founded by her father in 1972. And her father held quite extreme views. He essentially would describe the Holocaust as, you know, that didn't really happen.

And he denied French participation in it. And she was political tradition. She followed her father. into the European Parliament. So even though she does not believe in European integration, wants to take France out of the single currency, may want to leave the EU itself, she has been a member of the European Parliament since 2004. She took over the leadership of the party from her father in 2011. And then you had this amazing drama between Marine Le Pen and her father,

Jean-Marie Le Pen, in that in 2015, her father from the party that he had led for almost 40 years. And it was because she came to see her father as a liability. His extreme views, his anti-Semitism, was seen as an obstacle in her eyes to the National Front gaining legitimacy and broader popularity. So she has tempered the image of the National Front quite successfully, you could argue. And so she has been trying to have the party seem, quote, unquote, more normal. And it's really interesting because if you look at how well she did in this first round, so as we mentioned before, she took, well, about 20, if we rounded up 22% of the vote in this first round, that equals almost 7.7 million votes.

Okay, if you compare that to the last presidential election in France in 2012, she had 6.4 million votes in the first round there. If you go back to 2002, when her father made it through the first round in a presidential election, he got about 4.8 million votes in the second round. So, you know, she has increased support for this party. And it's interesting because there is a correlation between unemployment and rural areas voting for Marine Le Pen. So in the same way in the U.S., we saw sort of the middle of the country voting for Donald Trump and the coasts in the big cities voting for Hillary Clinton, you do see similar patterns in France. So that's what you see with Marine Le Pen. Emmanuel Macron, he, on the one hand, builds him. as an outsider, but on the other hand, he's the product of the classic French education

for people who go into politics. He went to Cianos Po and ENA, ANA, these are sort of the classic schools for the French political elite. He actually was economics minister in the current president, President Hollande's government. He left that government to start this movement. We had talked about earlier, Amash. I would point out, on Marsh, the initials EM, are exactly the same initials as Emmanuel Macron, quite clever. He's young, he's 39, he's charismatic, and maybe it's worth mentioning that in most interviews Macon gives, where he's asked, you know, what was the defining political moment for you, he talks about watching Jean Macon, Le Pen, the father of Marine Le Pen, reached that second round of the French presidential election in 2002.

And when he talks about that, he said at that moment, he began to worry that if the mainstream political parties in France didn't change radically, then the far right would move ever closer to power. So that reflection on his part is really quite striking when you see him now meeting Marine Le Pen in the second round of the French presidential election. So I guess that's a question a lot of people have, which is the current French prime minister said that if Le Pen were elected, it would lead to the end of Europe and the euro. In 2014, she told Der Spiegel, I want to destroy the EU. The EU is deeply harmful. It's anti-democratic. I want to prevent it from becoming fatter. from continuing to breathe, from grabbing everything with its paws. That is some vivid imagery. Do you think that's hyperbole from a candidate and her adversary, or do these comments offer

a fair assessment of the stakes of this election and explain why it's gotten so much attention outside of France? So, Tommy, I do not like to think of myself as a drama queen, but I agree with that characterization. I think this election is uniquely consequential. for the future of Europe. And I say that because of the broader context. Let's remember, last June, you had a referendum in the United Kingdom that resulted in a yes vote for the UK, the second largest economy in the European Union leaving. So this European Union that since it was founded in 1957,

has always moved more deeply on the integration front and has consistently widened its membership for the first time you have an EU member saying, you know what, on balance, we'd rather be out. So that was a significant blow. You have a European Union that's still managing a Eurozone crisis among those 19 countries that share a FUG and migration crisis. the fundamental source of which the Syrian Civil War is still an assertive Russia on the EU's eastern border that is creating tumult not only in the eastern part of the continent through its illegal annexation of Crimea, taking the sovereign territory of its neighbor Ukraine, but is actively trying to influence politics in countries like France and broader developments in the European Union.

So a lot of bad things are happening. A lot of forces are at play that are working to pull the European Union together. And what are the forces that can hold Europe together? At the core, everybody always looks at Germany and selects the person of Marine Le Pen, who, as you articulately stated, is committed to European project. I think it would have tremendous impact on what happens in Europe. That matters for the U.S. because for the past 70 years, American policymakers have believed that it was in our interest. Never go to war again.

And the best antidote to that was seen as a European community and then European Union that would forge cooperation among these countries. Ewe. Scary. You're geeking out with me on POTSA of the World. More on the way. So every article you read, at least in the U.S. draws some comparison to the 2016 presidential election. And the gist of it is Trump and Le Pen are extremist, nationalists, xenophobic. Their opponents are more welcoming of globalization. Do you think there's merit to those comparisons? Can you actually draw a line between the U.S. election to Brexit,

it to this? Or do you think that there are regional issues, issues with the candidates like you described earlier that are as are more important and that just don't make for as interesting of a narrative? So I would never say that national differences don't matter. Of course they do. And there are national stories in Britain, in the U.S., in France, and for that matter, in Austria, in the Netherlands, other countries that have had elections in past months. But there is no question that there is an overarching narrative that connects all of these national stories. And it has to do with feel that they have because of globalization. And there's a lot of discussion today that maybe the schism we see in our society is not a left-right schism,

but it's a schism, sort of open societies versus closed societies, nationalism versus internationalism. And I think we see that across all of these countries. And that's where the comparisons with the U.S. election and with Donald Trump come in. You know, Marine Le Pen is anti-Multilateralism, anti-immigration, anti-Islam. And this sense of we need to leave the European Union to regain control over our borders, to regain our ability to defend our citizens. Very similar in some ways to the rhetoric that you heard in the UK around the Brexit referendum, where many Brits wanted to regain sovereignty. They wanted to take back control. And you heard that in many ways in the U.S. election as well.

So I think there's a sense that large swaths of our publics have that they're losing their identity, their American identity, their English identity, their French identity, because of globalization, because of immigration, and they're threatened by that. And the question is, are our political leaders, you know, in those cases where the center holds, if Emmanuel Macron wins the second round of this French election, will he be able to put in place an agenda that does change the economic trajectory that France has been on, that turns around the low growth, the high unemployment? And will he be able to show French voters that that sort of liberal democratic system of governance can deliver for its people? And I think that question is there across all of the country in the space that we've seen go through elections over the past nine months. Do you think that there's some legitimacy to the criticism of the EU or to the euro as a common currency?

You have people who are saying, you know, there's this forced economic integration of the countries in the EU without a political integration that was necessary to make it work the way the United States makes it work. they also point to the euro as potentially one of the reasons that the European economies have rebounded slowly since the crisis. Do you think there's merit to those criticisms at all? I think there's absolute merit to those criticisms. There is no question. The European Union is not perfect. The euro, as you know, when the euro is a single currency was created, lots of economists were saying, gosh, it's going to be really tough to create a monetary union if you don't have a fiscal union. And there just wasn't the political will at the time to do that. And we've seen since the onset of the Eurozone crisis, those 19 Eurozone members make a lot of

progress on a banking union, make a lot of progress on trying to have greater commonalities across their economies, but they still have really important steps to take. And the European Union, And for many European citizens, the European Union feels far away. And in the U.S., there's so much criticism of Washington and the swamp and draining the swamp. In a way, Brussels is that for Europeans. They talk about Brussels in those terms. Too much regulation, too far removed from the common people. And so I wish that the day after the Brexit referendum, so on June 24th, the day after,

the European Union would have stood up and said, hey, you know what? we hear the message, and there are important reforms we need to put into place, and we're taking that on. And the hope is that if Macon were to win in a second round, that you perhaps could envision a reinvigorated Franco-German core that implement substantial reforms that would speak to those legitimate criticisms of how the EU functions. And just to remind that Germany will have elections in September. So it's unclear that you would see too much movement immediately, though I think you probably would see Merkel and then possibly Macon step out immediately. But I think it really would be after the German elections that we would be expecting some significant reform effort on the part of that Franco-German core.

That's interesting. So the early opinion polls, and I think we've all learned to stay out of the prediction game and not put too much stock in the early polls. But assuming the prediction polls are accurate in France, it sounds like Macron is likely to win the runoff. And depending on who you listen to, this could either be the high watermark moment for far right parties in Europe. And we can feel some relief or it could be an uh-oh moment because even if Le Pen loses her party is now a major force in French politics. Do you believe it's one of those extremes or is the truth somewhere in between? I think that it's likely to win in the second round. One of the surprises of the first round was that the public opinion polls were pretty much right on.

We haven't seen that in recent elections, but it did turn out to be the case in the French election. We saw very high voter participation of over 80%. There's a question about whether you'll see that high a participant. participation rate in the second round, because it's not clear in particular that those who voted for that far-left candidate, Melanchon, that I had mentioned earlier, that they will go to the polls. Interestingly, the other two major candidates, Fion and Hamon, have encouraged their voters to vote for Macron. It's not clear where Le Pen will pick up additional votes from. There's some speculation that the traditional right party voters, the Republicans, some of those folks may migrate to Le Pen. It is possible that some of the far left voters could migrate to Le Pen in the same way that we saw some crossover from Bernie Sanders voters to Donald Trump. But she seems to have some limit to her ability to take on additional voters. So the speculation is that.

But in that second round, Emmanuel Macron would get close to 60%. She would get close to 40%, which is still quite a striking outcome. If we remember that in 2002, her father could not even clear the 20% mark in that second round. So I think the message here is, look, even if Macon would understand that the extremes have proven very popular in this election cycle in France, there is deep dissatisfaction among a broad swath of the French public. And that dissatisfaction needs to be addressed if there is going to be a rebalancing of strong majorities in EU countries that believe in thisocratic system of governance that has been with us since the end of World War II. You're listening to Pod Save the World.

Stick around. There's more great show coming your way. There's a lot of concern about potential Russian interference in the election and reports of cyber attacks on Macron's campaign from groups with ties to Russian intelligence or the Russian military. How worried should we be about potential Russian interference in the French election? And can you help people understand why Russia might want to have Le Pen win and to break up the EU? So Russia clearly has been trying to influence these elections. We've seen lots of reporting on this. And the reason that they would be interested in interfering in this election is ever since Russia illegally annexed Crimea, which is a sovereign part of Ukraine's territory, the European Union has had sanctions in place. against Russia. They've done this in coordination with the United States, and it's been quite striking to see the 28 EU member states remain solid on this, because you have very

different relationships across those 28 countries with Russia, historically, economically, politically, socially, culturally. So I look at that and say, the glass has been half full on the EU's ability to stay united in disapproving of Russia's neighbor. Russia's not happy about these sanctions. Russia's economy is not doing well, not only because of the sanctions, but also because oil and gas prices have been so low. So Russia has been interested in solidarity among EU member states on sanctions. Le Pen, interestingly, her party has gotten substantial loans from Russian bank. Le Pen has quite a close relationship to Russia. She has gone and visited Vladimir Putin. Interestingly, the center-right parties candidate, Fiona, also suggested he was interested in warming

the relationship that France had with Russia. Macon consistently has said, no, you know, Russia has behaved badly. It is abrogated values we believe in. We need to stay the course on Russia. So it's pretty clear that Putin would much prefer a Le Pen or even a Fillon than a Macron. So in the second round, the clear suspicion is that Russia will double down on its efforts to try to be helpful to Le Pen. Wonderful. You mentioned earlier the role of Syria in the election, in the fact that it has become a substantive political football. Anglo-Mircle of Germany was extremely welcoming to Syrian refugees and paid a cost for it. Macron has been supportive of Merkel's efforts and of refugees generally.

How big a factor do you think Syria and the resulting refugee crisis has been in this election or in Europe generally in public opinion? So it's quite interesting, if you compare France and Germany, because Germany has taken the lion's share of those Syrian refugees. Essentially, when that influx began, Germany and Sweden, were the two countries that welcomed those refugees. By the end of 2015, Sweden said, we cannot take any more, closed its borders. And then Germany was sort of the last EU member state still standing that was accepting these refugees.

We can have a separate conversation about why Merkel made that decision. But France was not welcoming of those refugees. France has a large immigrant population because of its own, history in Africa. And an issue that Marine Le Pen has gotten an enormous amount of traction on has been the issue of immigration, refugees, Islam. In that sense, there is no question that the civil war in Syria, the outpouring of refugees, has had a broad impact on European politics. This is also true in the case of the UK, in the case of the Netherlands, the elections that we've seen over these past several months. Now, what strikes me about this, and it's one of the reasons Marie Le Pen

says, we need to leave the European Union, because if we're in the European Union, we are not able to control our own borders. Let's unpack that, Tommy. Now, if you're a member of the European Union and you're part of the single market, they always talk about the four freedoms, right? And one of those freedoms is the freedom for EU member states to travel across the EU and work in other EU countries. So it is true. If you're member of the EU, then other EU citizens have the right to come to France. Okay. Then there's another part of this process of European integration. It's called the Schengen area. And that relates to passport-free travel. So if you're in Schengen, And so let's say I fly to Berlin and then I fly on to Paris.

I don't have to show my passport when I go to Paris because I entered that Schengen area in Germany. That is a policy you can opt in or out of. France is part of Schengen. The UK never has been. Okay. So those are sort of the levels of how you move within the European Union. When you're talking about an influx, let's say, of Syrian refugees, France, can control its national borders. But wow, it seems to me like France has a big interest in

cooperating with its neighbors that are closer to Syria, right? So maybe Greece or all the countries that those refugees have to come through. Or if you're talking about migrants from Africa, then you're going to be working closely with other southern neighbors like Italy or Spain. And so I think where Macon comes down is we need within the European Union to build a manage the external borders of the European Union because that at the end of the day is how we manage this problem not only for the EU but also for France. So those are some of the debates that you have around what is a very sensitive issue and what clearly is playing into this sense of losing identity, your culture being eaten away, and this us versus them mentality

that's played such a big role in this French election. That's fascinating. So my last question for you, and thank you so much for your time, is, you know, it's been reported that Steve Bannon, Trump's senior advisor, hates the EU. A former Breitbart staffer told Politico that he figures it's an instrument for globalism. That same political piece noted that Donald Tusk, the president of the EU's European Council sent a letter to member states characterizing that Trump administration as a menace to the EU alongside the likes of Russia and radical Islam and that they may need to start viewing America not as a stalwart friend but a threat. What do you think they mean by an instrument for globalism? And what could it ban on or a Trump White House do to weaken the EU or impact politics?

policy. So it is true that there are many things that President Trump said in the realm to his election and that things that have been said by some in the administration that suggest a very different approach of a Trump administration to Europe, the European Union, these allies that have been so important to the U.S. since the end of World War II. And you could contrast the fact that when Barack Obama was president, he made a stop in the UK to make the case for Britain staying in the EU. As I recall at the time, you talked about how much the U.S. values a strong United Kingdom in a strong European Union. And, you know, there was a hot debate at the time about whether that was helpful or not to the efforts of then Prime Minister David Cameron. But it was very much the expression of

American president arguing that European integration was good for the UK, was good for the rest of Europe, and was good for the U.S. And Donald Trump was very clear that he was a supporter of Brexit and that he could understand why the U.K. would feel its sovereignty was being eaten away by the EU and would choose to leave. And that was quite striking for a U.S. president to take that stance. And we saw in an interview that President Trump did shortly before his inauguration where he spoke at some length about the European Union expressing his view that it didn't maybe really matter to him whether the EU stayed as a union of 28 or whether those 28 EU member states were on their own and weren't held together in some union. Now, interestingly, in more recent weeks, President Trump has said that the European Union is doing better than he expected. So it could be that his view on this is evolving as he's had the opportunity to meet with more European leaders and speak with them by phone. And he'll be making a couple of trips to Europe this spring.

Next month in May, he'll be going to a NATO summit in Brussels. He'll be continuing on to a G7, a group of seven meeting in Italy. And then he'll return in July for the G20 summit in Hamburg, Germany. So it may well be that President Trump's views on this will develop, but certainly for the past 70 years, every U.S. administration, whether Republican or Democratic, has articulated a view that deeper European integration is in the U.S. interest and that we see economic benefits to us of that, that we see political benefits to us of that. and the organization I run the German Marshall Fund, we're celebrating the 70th anniversary of the Marshall Plan this year. And that was the first time when the U.S. articulated its policy in support of European cooperation. So I've clearly drug the Kool-Aid on this and do see why this benefits American interests. But I think you could also make a compelling case that that.

European process of integration benefits French interests and broader European interests, too. I agree with you. Karen, thank you so much for your time. This is fascinating. We will be watching very, very, very closely as this second round of the election goes off on May 7th, I believe. I might harass you again if things go south. But we will cross our fingers that there's a good outcome here. We will because you never know.

So keep those things across because the consequences are. significant. And Tommy was a total delight to talk to you. Thanks so much for reaching out. Appreciate it.