It will be a rare event: An address to France’s Assemblée Nationale by the leader of a country at war. On Friday, June 7, French MPs will attend a speech by Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. Before his speech, scheduled for around 9:45 am, he will be welcomed by Assemblée Nationale President Yaël Braun-Pivet.
“We must continue to maintain this close relationship with the Ukrainians and assure them of our support,” she said on Tuesday evening to MPs after the Les Républicains (LR, right) leader Olivier Marleix raised a point of order. Marleix said it was “inappropriate” and even “regrettable” to invite the Ukrainian president “48 hours” before French voters cast their ballots in the European elections, which take place on Sunday. “This does not, of course, detract from our support for the Ukrainians,” he emphasized.
Zelensky is set to deliver a 20-minute speech in the presence of Prime Minister Gabriel Attal on Friday, as well as several ministers. It will be an opportunity for the Ukrainian leader, whose country has been under attack from Russian President Vladimir Putin’s army for over two years, to reiterate Ukraine’s need for military support.
Overlapping events
While in recent months French President Emmanuel Macron has not ruled out the possibility of sending French troops to Ukraine − a suggestion that has sparked controversy among his allies and angered Russia − he and his Ukrainian counterpart are due to meet at the Elysée Palace on Friday to discuss Kyiv’s “needs” vis-à-vis Moscow, Macron’s office announced on Tuesday. French officials have been considering sending French and European military instructors to Ukraine.
This is the second time since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine on February 24, 2022, that Zelensky has been called upon to speak before the Assemblée. Less than a month after the Kremlin launched its offensive, he addressed French MPs by videoconference on March 23, 2022, as part of a virtual tour of European parliaments aimed at mobilizing the international community around the situation unfolding in Ukraine.
This year, the last-minute invitation to the Assemblée has fallen under France’s commemorations to mark the 80th anniversary of D-Day. Zelensky is expected to be in Normandy on Thursday, alongside Macron and US President Joe Biden.
With just a few days to go before the June 9 vote, this overlapping of commemorative and electoral calendars has annoyed the opposition, which has once again accused Macron of “hijacking” the home stretch of the European campaign, in the words of Marleix, and of “trying to gain political advantage” from the Russian-Ukrainian conflict, as well as from media coverage of the D-Day commemorations. “It’s a desire to manipulate public opinion,” said Marine Le Pen, leader of the far-right Rassemblement National (RN) party, on Wednesday, on French radio. “We’re not going to line up to applaud something [the invitation to Zelensky] on which we’d never been asked our opinion,” said radical left leader Jean-Luc Mélenchon on Tuesday.
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