Le Pen rules out EU exit referendum, reigniting the euro debate

Le Pen rules out the EU exit referendum: Frexit left without a date

Marine Le Pen has said it plainly: there will be no referendum on leaving the European Union. The leader of the National Rally has justified the U-turn with an argument that, in politics, sounds almost like a provocation: she does explain why she has changed her mind, while others do so without giving any account. The announcement comes after years in which Frexit was the party's flagship cause, and a single tweet was enough to split the conversation in two.

The first effect is one of internal coherence. Those who voted for Le Pen expecting a sovereignty referendum now find that the vote disappears from the programme without ever reaching the ballot box. The most repeated defence is that the party has moderated itself in order to win, and that this moderation is the price of replacing the traditional right, seen as a worse manager of public discontent. The theory going around is that an even further-right force is needed to push the boundaries of what can be said, so that the window of the acceptable shifts and what seems radical today becomes mainstream tomorrow.

Why Le Pen is giving up the EU exit referendum

The technical argument carries more weight than the ideological one. Leaving the euro and the Union requires a plan that no one has put on the table, and the British precedent does not invite optimism: Brexit was negotiated with enormous difficulty and, years later, a large part of the British electorate looks back with nostalgia at what it left behind. For a continental country, with dense trade, financial and human ties to its neighbours, the operation is far more complex. The conclusion that imposes itself is that the EU is not undone through the door of a single state, but, if anything, through a general crisis that drags everyone along.

There is another flank, and it is financial. France is under suspicion of being the eurozone's weak link, with investment banks speculating about a protective shield for Spain, Italy or Greece that, initially, would not be extended to Paris. In that context, promising an exit from the euro is not boldness: it is playing with the debt costs of an already strained country.

Sovereigntism looks to microstates and forgets about scale

The comparison with Andorra, Switzerland, Liechtenstein, Monaco or Singapore runs through the discussion like a mantra. They are prosperous economies outside the EU architecture, true. But they also use the euro de facto, are inside the Schengen area and operate with a margin that a state of 68 million inhabitants with a systemic financial sector does not have. The analogy breaks down over size.

What is left of Frexit is, above all, rhetoric. And rhetoric, on the campaign trail, has a problem: it is measured in votes.

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The exact point where the analysis gets stuck is this: if moderation serves to win, what is left of the programme once in government? No one answers. And without an answer, the electorate that believed in the referendum is entitled to ask what the point of believing was.