Who remembers the final days of the European election campaign, President Volodymyr Zelensky’s warnings to the Assemblée Nationale and President Emmanuel Macron’s announcements about sending combat aircraft to Ukraine? The earthquake of the Assemblée’s dissolution not only relegated the Ukrainian question to the background but also rendered the French president inaudible on the subject, though he tried to make it one of the issues of the European ballot.

In the two blocs dominating the debates, the Nouveau Front Populaire left-wing alliance and the far-right Rassemblement National (RN), the same observation can be made: The topic of Ukraine – and hence that of relations with Russia – is all but forgotten, hidden beneath a facade of unanimity or simply swept under the rug.

It’s on the left that the turnaround is the most noticeable, following the disagreement over Ukraine, which was a major dividing issue throughout the European campaign. Socialist-backed Raphaël Glucksmann, who came out on top on the left (13.8%), constantly referred Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s La France Insoumise (LFI, radical left) to its past positions: a more or less acknowledged support for Syria’s Bashar al-Assad, attacks on NATO which was blamed for the war in Ukraine, vilification of dead or alive Russian opposition figures and reiteration of Russian theses of “neo-Nazis” influencing power in Kyiv, the accusations are well known and long-standing.

On the other side, LFI and the RN tried to cast suspicion on Glucksmann’s commitments, portraying his past collaboration with former Georgian president Mikheil Saakashvili, now imprisoned by a pro-Russian authoritarian government, as a troubled episode. Glucksmann has also been portrayed as a “warmonger.”

‘We had to fight over a lot of words’

These divisions were bridged in record time with the drafting of the Nouveau Front Populaire’s common policy platform, which, on Ukraine, aligns itself with the positions of the Socialists and the Greens. The objective and the means are clearly stated: “To defeat Vladimir Putin’s war of aggression and make him answer for his crimes before international justice: Unfailingly defend the sovereignty and freedom of the Ukrainian people, as well as the integrity of its borders, by delivering the necessary weapons, canceling its foreign debt and seizing the assets of the oligarchs who contribute to the Russian war effort.”

“It wasn’t easy, we had to fight over a lot of words,” said MEP Aurore Lalucq, who led the negotiations for Glucksman’s micro-party, Place Publique. “The subject was one of the essential elements for us and called for clarification. It’s not trivial, not just a line in the program. It’s about what’s at the heart of the ideological program and identity of the different parties.” In other words, it’s not only about Mélenchon’s geopolitical positioning, it’s also about his democratic convictions.

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