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Party stances and differences between competing parties on Europe can be analysed by using different data sources. Apart from party manifesto data and data gained from newspaper analysis, we dispose of expert surveys. The Chapel Hill expert surveys (Bakker et al. 2015) on party positions towards issues of European integration provide us with data for several French parties since 1999. Hence, we are able to track changes over time.

First, we look at the salience of European issues for different parties. How much variation over time can we observe? In their study of public debates on European issues during national election campaigns in France from 1974-2012, based on newspaper content analysis, Hutter and Kerscher (2014) could show that the salience of European issues followed a clearly upward trend over time. Guinaudeau and Persico (2013) likewise pointed to a rise of European issue salience during the 1990s that started with the Maastricht referendum debate and showed no signs of lasting decline thereafter.

The Chapel Hill expert surveys conducted in 1999, 2002, 2006, 2010 and 2014 provide us with a more nuanced picture. Experts had to evaluate the relative salience of European integration in the parties’ public discourse in a given year on an 11-point-scale, ranging from 0 “European Integration is of no importance, never mentioned” to 10 “European Integration is the most important issue”. As graph 5 shows, none of the parties for which we have data since 1999 ranked below the neutral middle category of 5. By the end of the 1990s, no established French party could afford to ignore European integration issues. The evolving salience of Europe does not show a clear trend for the two mainstream centre-left and centre right parties, the Socialists (Parti socialiste, PS) and the neo-Gaullist (Le Rassemblement pour la République and L'Union pour un mouvement populaire, RPR/UMP) now Les Républicains. It went somewhat down from 2010 to 2014. The opposite holds true for the populist right and left wing parties, the Front national (FN) and the Left Party (Parti de Gauche, PdG). They both scored above 8 on the 11-point issue salience scale (FN 8.5 PdG 8.1). The Greens (Les Verts), for which we unfortunately have no data for 2014, came close to the FN level in 2010.

[28] Graph 5: Salience of European issues

Source: Chapel Hill surveys 1999-2014.

In the 1980s, European integration issues did not have high currency in the FN’s discourse. Similar to other fringe parties (Taggart 1998), the FN played with Euroscepticism without making it a core identity marker. Over the past two decades this has changed profoundly. In the 2014 European Parliament Election, the FN “claimed effective ‘ownership’ over the European issue, winning the bulk of the Eurosceptic vote to top the electoral field” (Goodliffe 2015: 324). Nowadays, this does not only hold true for European Parliament elections. In the national presidential election campaign in 2017, the FN’s candidate Marine Le Pen has made widely use of European issues to distinguish herself from her mainstream competitors. It is not by coincidence that the first of her 144 policy proposals presented to the voters deals with France’s membership in the EU. She promised to restore the French people’s sovereignty – monetary, legislative, territorial, and economic – and to hold a referendum on French membership after negotiations with the EU (Le Pen 2017). The same holds true on the opposite end of the political spectrum. Jean-Luc Mélenchon, the presidenatial candidate of the left-wing populist 'France Unbowed' (La France insoumise) and former president of the Left Party (Parti de Gauche), [29] also campaigned strongly on European issues, trying to make the 2017 presidential election a “referendum on Europe”⁴ and playing with the idea of a leave referendum in case the European Union cannot be changed along his preferred lines.

The way the Front National, the Left Party and France Unbowed have made always more use of European issues during the last years testifies to their capacity to react on the ‘supply side’ to evolutions on the ‘demand side’ of voter’s political-ideological and policy preferences. But we assume the causal arrow to point both ways: The more salient the ‘supply’ of Eurosceptic discourses by political parties will grow the more they will reinforce Eurosceptic public opinion. With the rising salience of and more polarisation on European issues, we can expect that mass public attitudes towards European political themes will become more structured and less superficial than in the past. If this holds true, Euroscepticism becomes more embedded and institutionalised both in public opinion and in the party system.

For mainstream parties the attempt to make Europe a highly salient issue in public debate comes at a price in case they are internally split on this issue. This was true for the neo-Gaullist party in the 1990s, especially on the occasion of the Maastricht referendum in 1992. And this was also true for the Socialist Party (PS) in the 2000s, especially regarding the 2005 referendum on the European Constitutional Treaty.⁵

The divisive influence of European integration issues on intra-party competition was arguably strongest felt by the French Socialist Party. The PS faced the most dramatic manifestations of an intra-party split, first when it called for a referendum on the European Constitutional Treaty within the party in December 2004 and, five months later, when it campaigned in the French referendum for EU constitutional treaty change (Petithomme 2012; Schild 2005; Wagner 2008).

This pronounced internal split on European integration issues has been made well visible by our expert survey where experts were asked to locate parties on a 11-point-scale ranging from 0 “Party was completely united” to 10 “Party was extremely divided”. No other party was ranked higher than the PS in terms of internal divisions on Europe since 2006, a long-term consequence of the 2004-5 referendum experience (see Graph 6).

During the years of the Euro-crisis, the attitudes towards the EU and its management of the euro area crisis have become another sensitive touchstone of intra-party dissent and power struggles. Criticisms of the “austerity-cumstructural-reform-approach” of Germany towards the sovereign debt crisis in the euro area and the policy of fiscal consolidation at the domestic level in [30] France served as mobilising devices and identity markers for the Socialist Party’s left wing. A substantial minority of the Socialist party group in the National Assembly was no longer willing to lend support to its own government and therefore voted, among others, against the French stability program for cutting budget deficits.

Graph 6: Level of intra party dissent on European integration

Source: Chapel Hill surveys 1999-2014.

Mainstream parties also contributed to the abovementioned trend of embedding European issues in domestic political debates. Put under pressure from their more extreme competitors, the PS and Les Républicains (LR, the former neo-Gaullist UMP) took up some elements of the extreme-left or –right wing’s critical discourses on the EU and “played” with Euroscepticism (Rozenberg 2011). Sure, the centre-left and centre-right mainstream parties are still to be found on the pro-EU side in French debates on European issues. The results of the Chapel Hill expert surveys display, however, a drop of their support for European integration between 2010 and 2014 (see Graph 7).⁶ This might reflect the criticisms of both candidates for the presidency in 2012, the then sitting president Nicolas Sarkozy and his challenger François Hollande, as “the two candidates in the second round of the elections went ‘EU-negative’ to rally additional votes. Sarkozy mentioned, on the one hand, his intention to suspend the Schengen agreements, unless changes in its implementation were made. Hollande, on the other hand, proclaimed his commitment to renegotiate the [31] European Budgetary Pact that EU member states had just agreed to in December 2011” (Vassallo 2012: 79).

Graph 7: General party support for European integration

Source: Chapel Hill surveys 1999-2014.

In fact, after his election, François Hollande could not deliver on his (unrealistic) promise to renegotiate the Fiscal Compact. This failure and his efforts to cut back the French public deficit to bring the country back into line with the rules enshrined in the Stability and Growth Pact contributed to a revolt of the “frondeurs” from the Socialist Party’s left-wing in the National Assembly. At several occasions, some dozen socialist Members of Parliament voted against their own government and even tabled a motion of censure against it. One of them was Benoît Hamon who won the primary as the left candidate for the French presidency in January 2017. He stands for a clear break with the legacy of the previous Socialist President Hollande in both economic and European policies. Never since the time of François Mitterrand has the Socialist Party base chosen to be represented in the race for the highest political office in France by a contender that was more sceptical about the EU’s current trajectory than Benoît Hamon.

A similar kind of critical discourse with Eurosceptic overtones could also be observed inside the French Republican Party (the former UMP). Some of the contenders for the party’s primaries to select their presidential candidate took an even more critical stance than the party ever did in the past. This was true for the former president Sarkozy. To a lesser extent, this was also true for François Fillon who made the race in the primaries by developing a public [32] discourse with strong Gaullist accents stressing French sovereignty, independence and the need to redress France.

The reinforcement of these elements of soft Euroscepticism in the discourses of both mainstream parties, PS and Republicans, can be attributed to the institution of primaries for selecting each party’s candidate to run for the highest French State office. This type of electoral contest with low participation rates (compared to presidential elections) provides a fertile ground that helps cultivate more radical political positions beyond the party’s mainstream. This was especially true for the political left. The winner of the Socialist primary, Benoît Hamon, had always held a marginal position inside the PS and would not have had the slightest chance to be selected as the PS’s official candidate by a party convention.

This soft form of Euroscepticism on the part of the mainstream centre-left and centre-right parties created incentives for the challenger parties and candidates to adopt always harder Eurosceptic stances, as the 2017 election campaigns for the presidency and the National Assembly demonstrated. This holds true for both the Front national’s candidate Marine Le Pen and candidate of France Unbowed, Jean-Luc Mélenchon.

The former Minister of the Economy during the Hollande Presidency, Emmanuel Macron, was the only candidate to make unambiguously the case for deepening European integration.⁷ This liberal, centre-left candidate embraced both European integration and globalisation, standing for a France that is culturally and economically open to the world. This stands in contrast to a trend in French political discourse on Europe that has grown ever more sceptical over time (Rozenberg 2011; Schild 2009). Therefore, both Emmanuel Macron and Marine Le Pen became the most likely candidates for the second and decisive round of the presidential elections. Such a configuration of candidates for the presidential elections would perfectly embody the growing salience and increasing degree of polarisation about issues of European integration in domestic French politics. While Macron appeals to younger, cosmopolitan, urban, highly educated and professionally successful and dynamic parts of the French society, Le Pen finds strong support among the left behind, the ‘losers’ of globalisation and European integration in the lower, less well educated strata of society, in rural regions and in declining industrial areas. Dubbed ‘integration-demarcation cleavage’ (Kriesi et al. 2008), this line of conflict is rooted in the social structure and has the potential to restructure domestic politics and the party system in France in a more durable way in the future.