Brexit: Looking At A Tale of Two Elections

Theresa May’s premiership may be hanging by a thread but some Londoners have indeed received strong and stable leadership after venturing to the ballot box.

London’s large French community voted in France’s legislative elections in recent weeks. They helped to elect Emmanuel Macron’s man in London, Alexandre Holroyd to the Northern Europe seat in the Assemblée Nationale in Paris. Macron’s party, La République En Marche, secured an impressive victory with 350 seats in the 577-seat legislature. What does Macron’s success mean for London? Does Labour-leaning London have more in common politically with France than with the rest of the UK? And what do these elections tell us about Europe?

The City under French siege

Back in February, then-candidate Macron had just had a meeting with Theresa May when he stood on the steps of Downing Street and made an audacious pitch. He told reporters that he wanted to make France an attractive proposition for “bankers, talents, researchers, academics”.

Promising a pro-business and pro-European agenda, Macron wants to lure some of London’s most valuable companies to the banks of the Seine. HSBC has since announced plans to move 1000 bankers to Paris.

Macron’s vision of a reformed France and a reformed Europe may lead to other banks and businesses following this lead.

Inside the EU, London has been a global city with unparalleled appeal but outside the EU it faces a real challenge to keep hold of The City’s strongest assets against some serious Parisian persuasion.

Macron is willing to keep the door open for the UK to remain in the EU but if it is set to leave the union he will be eager to poach as many prizes as possible for Paris and Europe.

London’s Lust

London is saddled with a national government that is willing to force a destructive form of hard Brexit and  is dependent on the Democratic Unionist Party of Northern Ireland for control of Parliament while pursuing a cosy partnership with President Trump. And yet the British capital is socially liberal, proudly European and naturally Left-leaning.

It is a city uneasy with Brexit and queasy at the prospect of a party with social policies like the DUP’s becoming kingmakers, or rather queen makers.

It is only natural that there are envious eyes looking across the Channel.  Macron, the charismatic 39-year-old who ran his campaign like a start-up, is the antithesis of the parochial, over-cautious and weary Theresa May. May has declared that if “you are a citizen of the world, you are a citizen of nowhere.”

Macron on the other hand, is a European at heart, preluding his presidential victory speech by walking from the Louvre not to the notes of the French national anthem but to “Ode to Joy”, the anthem of the EU.

Most Londoners are Europeans at heart and citizens of the world, so Macron’s allure to Londoners is obvious.

Tide is turning

Brexit and Trump in 2016 were victories for nationalists and isolationists, with the Brexiteers proclaiming their referendum triumph as the death knell of the European project. Instead 2017 has seen Europeans uniting to push back against those who seek to divide.

Voters in the Netherlands and France have rejected anti-EU parties and embraced the European future envisaged by the new occupant of the Elysee Palace in Paris.

In both the UK and French elections London voters used the ballot box to punish those who would like to see a hard Brexit, endorsing Macron and helping to strip the Tories of their majority in parliament.

Both elections have shown that 60 years on from the Treaty of Rome the European project has life in it yet.

 

 

By Thomas Chambers

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