The French voters who deposit their ballots for the presidential election on Sunday April 24 may not know that the future of the Balkans is also at stake.

Sunday’s race will see two candidates with very different approaches to the European Union and the Balkans. One is current president, Emmanuel Macron, who has pushed for the Balkans to be integrated into an enlarged EU. Second is Marine Le Pen, whose far-right party Rassemblement national (National Rally) has questioned France’s position within Europe as well as the very existence of certain Balkan states.

As president of France for the last five years, Macron has pushed for EU enlargement and the integration of Balkan states into the Union. “He is at the origin of a French national strategy on the Balkans that is now more than four years old,” said a political advisor who has been based in the Balkans for some time. “And he has also made it a priority for the French presidency of the European Union.”

Macron, who is currently favored to win the race, has made a stronger EU a central aspect of his presidency. A center-right economic liberal, much of his presidency has been focused on reforms in the French labor market, which have led to lower unemployment in the country but which has had unequal results.

By contrast, Le Pen’s party, the National Rally, has long been Eurosceptic. 

In the 2017 election, her party called for France to exit the EU, though Le Pen no longer argues for a “Frexit,” as she used to. In fact, her manifesto barely mentions Europe at all, though it does argue for a European “alliance of nations” and stronger ID checks at the French borders. This would put the country at odds with European regulations. 

At home, she is known for her xenophobic approach to immigration and Islam; she has stated she will ban women from wearing the veil if she becomes president. 

Abroad, her party has strong ties with Victor Orbán’s regime in Hungary and supports his push for a less cohesive EU. 

If Le Pen is elected, she would close the door on any new memberships, says Joseph Krulic, high ranking judge of the National Court for the Right of Asylum and a historian of the Balkans.

Le Pen’s Euroscepticism goes hand in hand with her party’s ties to Russia. Le Pen’s party has  borrowed money from a Russian bank that it has not yet paid back and she has said that she hopes for a rapprochement between NATO and Russia “as soon as the Russia-Ukraine war” is over. 

Until the Russian invasion of Ukraine in February, her party was keen to highlight her closeness to Russian leader Vladimir Putin. A photo of her and the Russian president shaking hands graced her campaign pamphlets, which the party later destroyed.

Far-right stance on Kosovo

The two candidates also have very different approaches to Kosovo.

Kosovo has long been a country of interest to the far-right parties of France. Marine Le Pen’s rival on the right, Eric Zemmour, who won 7% of the vote in the first round and has now called upon his electors to vote for Le Pen, has long pointed to Kosovo as an example of his far-right and xenophobic theory of the “great replacement”: the idea that white Europeans are being taken over by Muslims and people of color.

In his book, “France Has Not Said Its Last Word Yet,” Zemmour devotes an entire chapter to Kosovo, which he uses as an opportunity to put forth xenophobic theories about the future of Europe. He also uses quotes around the words “country” and “independence” when referring to Kosovo.

Orthodox Christian Serbs, he writes, “are now only 5%, expelled from the capital Prishtina, and confined to enclaves, ostracized second-class citizens, when they are not persecuted, martyred, hunted, in the land of their ancestors.” He compares the country to Seine Saint-Denis, the department north-east of Paris that has a large Muslim population. “Kosovo is the future of Seine-Saint-Denis; Seine-Saint-Denis is the future of France.”

According to Balkan Insight, members of Le Pen’s National Rally party have also shared this message. Her party has ties to Solidarité Kosovo, a French organization that works “in the service of oppressed Christians” in Kosovo and which has ties to a number of far-right groups in France and Serbia.

Members of the party have also shown their support for Serbian nationalists in other ways. 

This January, members of the party attended an official ceremony for the banned public holiday Republika Srpska Day in Banja Luka, Bosnia and Herzegovina, showing support for the increasingly secessionist political aims of nationalist politician Milorad Dodik. After the visit, one deputy tweeted that he and his colleagues had come for “peace and out of respect for the group identities.”

This dynamic could shape French relationships with the Balkans in the years to come.

“The far right is quite present through the Balkans, since the European far right networks are fed by disinformation flows that also come from Russia and essentially pass through Serbia,” said the political advisor. 

The idea that Kosovo represents the “replacement” of Christians by Muslims is a narrative that can be found in Russian and Serbian propaganda, notes Pauline Soulier, who studies nationalism in the Balkans at the University of Bordeaux. 

“One can imagine that from a far-right perspective, Kosovo is perceived as a NATO creation,” said Florent Marciacq, Deputy Secretary-General of the Austro-French Centre for Rapprochement in Europe, hinting at the far right’s traditional distaste for the defense organization, which is perceived as a tool for American imperialism. 

But it would be unlikely that as president Le Pen could take steps to revoke France’s recognition of the country, which would be too politically complex and onerous to be worthwhile for her, according to the political advisor.

Even outside of the elections, the right-wing rhetoric has far-reaching implications for Kosovars. 

Currently, France has been blocking a scheme for Kosovars to obtain EU visas, something that residents of other Balkan states already have, says Marciacq, perhaps out of fear of negative political backlash. He notes that, “As long as France does not lift its opposition to visa liberalization, it is giving the impression that it is vulnerable to populism.”

Feature illustration: Atdhe Mulla / K2.0.