Nicolas Bay has been a French MEP since 2014. In February 2022 he was suspended from Rassemblement National (RN) and joined Éric Zemmour’s Reconquête party. He was re-elected in the June 9th elections and, following his expulsion from Reconquête due to cooperation with Marine Le Pen’s RN, now sits as a member of the European Conservatives and Reformists Group (ECR) in the European Parliament.
What do you think of the results of the European elections across the EU and in France in particular?
We are seeing a real awareness at European level of the ravages caused by socialist and liberal policies. In particular, mass immigration—which some people facilitate by claiming that it offsets the low native birth rate—is giving rise to a growing rejection. This was one of the main concerns for voters in all EU countries.
The pact on asylum and migration has crystallised this mistrust. Europe has been undergoing a migratory crisis—which, given its scale, could even be described as an invasion—for almost 10 years, and Brussels’ response has been to organise the arrival of ever greater numbers of migrants. Thanks to leaders like Giorgia Meloni, Jimmie Akesson, Viktor Orbán and Mateusz Morawiecki (when he was still in power in Poland), the pact is not as catastrophic as it could have been, but it falls far short of addressing what is at stake and could well create an additional ‘pull factors.’
Of course, I’m not forgetting the Green Deal, a tsunami of norms, and its catastrophic consequences for our agriculture and competitiveness. Nor do I forget the war of Russia against Ukraine. All these concerns have made many Europeans realise that we are heading for disaster because of the policies of Brussels, supported in particular by Emmanuel Macron and Olaf Scholz. As a result, more Europeans than ever before supported patriotic and conservative forces. The Left is in sharp decline. In France, the national bloc, thanks in particular to Marion Maréchal, obtained almost 37% of the vote, while Macron’s party collapsed to 14.6%. It’s a real paradigm shift.
With the arrival of new MEPs, including several from France, ECR is now the third largest group in the European Parliament. What is the key to success?
Success lies in being clear about what is at stake and speaking honestly about how to tackle the issues. Our political family draws its strength from pragmatism, both in the opposition and in the exercise of power, always at the service of the common good. We lie neither about the facts, nor about the solutions.
Our political opponents on the Left and in the centre do not hesitate to hide the facts at worst, to minimise them at best; they then promise wonders and wonders to repair the damage they have caused; finally, they enforce a politically correct dogmatism that aims to stifle all critical thinking, constructing an alternative reality in which migrants are all doctors and men can be women who have access to the toilets in which our daughters go. This no longer works.
Does Macron’s defeat mark the end of old politics in France?
Yes and no. Yes, because the cordon sanitaire has been broken thanks to the courage of Éric Ciotti, the president of the centre right Les Républicains party, who crossed the Rubicon and defied the ban decreed by François Mitterrand, the moral taboo weighing on the Right, which was forbidden to ally with the Rassemblement National with the threat of being excluded from the “republican arc” by the intelligentsia of the Left. For 40 years, this sword of Damocles prevented the Right from uniting in a coalition to defeat the Left. It’s finally over.
But no, because Emmanuel Macron has claimed to put an end to the left-right divide. He was supposed to end “old politics” in France. Yet, this divide, which is unsurpassable, is now back with a vengeance and is more structuring than ever. The Left and the Right are visions of the world, of society and of mankind. A great liberal parenthesis had obscured them for decades in France, and Macron seemed to be the culmination of this trend; he was merely its comet tail.
Reconquête had a good result and obtained five MEPs, but everything was complicated by the early elections called by Macron. What has happened?
We had a strategic and political disagreement with Éric Zemmour. He spent the campaign attacking the Rassemblement National as an enemy, whereas for our lead candidate Marion Maréchal the Rassemblement National was certainly a rival, with whom we have very clear differences (in political philosophy, in economics, on the defence of the family, and even on immigration too), but whom we saw as a future partner not to be insulted in order to be able to defeat Macron and the Left. What’s more, Éric Zemmour has engaged in an escalation of verbal provocation that is detrimental to the clarity of our political proposal.
On the evening of 9 June, after Marion Maréchal had managed to pass the 5% mark needed to have elected members in the European Parliament—no mean feat with the RN as high as 31.4%—Emmanuel Macron announced that he was dissolving the National Assembly. Immediately, we were presented with an historic opportunity: to build an electoral coalition to try to win these legislative elections and secure a right-wing majority.
Marion wanted to do this, but Éric Zemmour preferred to line up candidates who would merely deliver a testimony (with no prospect of obtaining anything more than a symbolic result of 1 or 2% of the vote nationwide) and divide voters, at the risk of causing the Right to lose … and allowing the far Left, quickly united, to come to power.
Faced with our refusal to go along with his headlong rush, Éric Zemmour expelled us, his three vice-presidents who had just been elected MEPs, and our partner Laurence Trochu, president of the Conservative Movement, who had also been elected. Duly noted. We will not jeopardise this chance to beat Macron and save France from the peril posed by the radical Left.
We have chosen to support the national union, as has the president of the Républicains Éric Ciotti, who has identified the same danger and joined this coalition while almost all of his party’s executives have preferred to remain in the fold of Emmanuel Macron, whom they will no doubt join in the near future.
Why does it seem so difficult to reach agreement between the forces on the Right?
In France, the famous cordon sanitaire put in place by François Mitterrand has done a lot of harm because the centre-right has always submitted to it. But they have shown by doing so that they are simply not right-wing, not conservatives, that they are basically liberal-leaning who have moreover been irresistibly attracted to Macron since 2017.
The dissolution provided a much-needed clarification. The right is now largely united by an electoral agreement; of course, there are nuances, and even within this coalition we retain our respective particularities. There is absolutely no question, for us or for Éric Ciotti, of joining the Rassemblement National. But we do want to work together, against the Left’s deadly project and Emmanuel Macron’s record. Within this agreement, we will defend our own conservative priorities.
Do you think Macron’s call for “unity against the extremes” was a failure? What do you think of the Popular Front of the Left?
Macron’s strategy is the same as that applied by the centre-right and centre-left for forty years. It no longer works. Macron himself has lost all credit. The appalling situation in which France finds itself—budget, security, migration, diplomacy—is his record. The French no longer trust him, as the results of 9 June shows. Macron will retain areas of strength in the major urban centres, but that will be a swan song.
As far as the Left is concerned, we can see that, as always, it was able to unite easily, from social democrats like former president François Hollande and Raphaël Glucksmann, who kept swearing a few weeks ago they had nothing to do with radical Left leader Jean-Luc Mélenchon, to violent Antifa groups, communists and even anti-Semites or radical Muslims. The Left shows that, despite its many nuances, there is no difference in nature. Some are simply in a greater hurry than others.
This coalition, of which Mélenchon’s France Insoumise is the heart, represents a mortal danger to France. If it came to power, the damage would be irreparable. Its programme is frightening: regularise all illegal immigrants and dramatically increase immigration, release criminals onto the streets, put an end to property rights, increase the budget deficit by €200 billion… The Right must win these elections. It’s vital if we are to avoid ruin and chaos in our country.
What is at stake for France, and to a large extent for Europe, in the forthcoming elections to the National Assembly?
For France, as I’ve just said, it’s a question of avoiding ruin and chaos, whether it’s by accelerating with the Left or by taking more measured steps with Macron. A victory for the Right is essential to protect the French, restore public finances, restore our education and health systems, lower taxes (the highest in Europe) to free up work and growth, to stop mass immigration and kick out illegals, to fight radical islam… It’s a titanic task, but there’s still time.
As for Europe, if the Right wins in France, we will be able to set the EU on the path of necessary reforms to enable our nations to cooperate while remaining sovereign, rather than pursuing the federalist march forward wanted by Macron and some others. We could throw all our weight behind our allies and friends already in power to rebalance the European Union and ensure that the Treaties are respected. In particular, we would renegotiate the Green Deal and the Migration Pact so that they are less ideological and more in line with the interests of our civilisation.
