President gathers France’s most prominent political party leaders for talks
Mr Hollande gathered France’s most prominent political party leaders — including Ms Pen — for a series of back-to-back meetings as he sought to thrash out a response to Thursday’s UK referendum.
The move comes less than a year before France’s presidential election, in which both Mr Hollande and Ms Le Pen are expected to run. The French president was also meeting Nicolas Sarkozy, his predecessor in the Elysee and another likely candidate in next year’s race.
Britain’s decision to leave the EU has further raised the profile of Ms Le Pen, whose National Front has already notched up a series of impressive results in local elections.
Ms Le Pen used Saturday’s meeting to reiterate her demands for a referendum on France’s membership of the EU, but she said that her calls were rejected and admitted that she was left “with the feeling of having come for nothing”.
She added that there was a clear strategy to make Britain’s exit painful so as to set an example to others. “It is clear that some people want the divorce to be as painful as possible so that others don’t get the idea of going down the same road as the British,” she said after the meeting with Mr Hollande.
The French president is seeking to adopt a tough stance on the UK’s decision — one that would impose costs on Britain for leaving the bloc — not least to limit Ms Le Pen’s calls for a so-called “Frexit”, and to avoid the issue dominating the forthcoming campaign.
On Saturday, Emmanuel Macron, the French economy minister, called for a new European project to make the bloc “much more transparent and democratic”, and said that it should be put to citizens via a referendum. “We have never had the courage to organise a real European referendum,” he said at Paris’s Sciences Po university conference. “This next project has to give it the strength.”
Marine Le Pen arrives at the Elysée Palace © AFP Mr Macron took a hard line on Britain’s decision to leave the EU, insisting that it was “the failure of the British government”. He added: “if we [the rest of Europe] have failed, it was to have allowed a member to take the European project hostage in a unilateral way.”
He said that the UK vote had shown that there were two Great Britains — “one that is happy with globalisation and within Europe … and there is a Great Britain that is afraid of globalisation”.
Mr Macron said that talks with the UK had to establish that Article 50 was the only way out of the EU, and that discussions had to be “rigorous” and “strict” in order to avoid Brexit contamination. “It has to have consequences,” he said.
He warned that by voting to leave, the UK would become a country akin to Guernsey, one of the low-tax Channel Islands. Britain would be “a small country in the scale of the world,” he said.
Yet there were jubilant scenes in the National Front headquarters on Friday, and its leaders appeared emboldened by the result across the Channel. Florian Philippot, FN’s vice-president, told reporters that Britain’s decision would force the same question on French voters. “We cannot escape a referendum [in France],” he said.
Mr Philippot, who is strongly associated with Ms Le Pen’s attempts to recast the party that her father founded in 1972 as a legitimate, mainstream party for the 21st century, added: “It shows the French people, first, that a referendum on the EU is possible — and in a country that has an equivalent size to France. And it shows that you can leave. That is considerable progress in political terms.”