The lengthy kerfuffle over fishing permits between the U.K. and France found its way into the French presidential campaign on Friday, with President Emmanuel Macron’s top man in parliament pointing a finger at Michel Barnier.
The EU’s former chief negotiator, who is running in the conservative party Les Républicains (LR) party primary, has recently enjoyed a surge in the polls after long being dismissed as an outsider — hence becoming a serious rival for Macron.
“Those who negotiated the Brexit treaty told us, ‘Don’t worry, everything’s fine’ … now we find there are imprecisions in the text which the U.K. is using,” Christophe Castaner, the president of Macron’s La République en Marche group at the National Assembly, said on Franceinfo Friday morning.
Asked whether he blamed Michel Barnier for these “imprecisions,” Castaner said: “If the U.K. can find a loophole in the text, it means it was not negotiated in the best way.”
Both countries are embroiled in a conflict over fishing rights in the Channel, in which France says licenses for boats to fish in British waters are missing, especially for boats fishing near the Channel Islands off the coast of Normandy. The British government stands by its “methodology” for providing licenses.
Tensions reached their peak a week before Castaner’s interview, with the French government threatening the U.K. with retaliation measures for the missing licenses. Paris and London reached a détente Thursday and agreed to restart political dialogue.
Asked about Castaner’s comments, Barnier remained unfazed but reiterated his position that “the British were not acting in good faith,” the AFP reported.
It’s the first time someone on Macron’s side has explicitly blamed the deal for the dispute on fishing rights.
The French government had always stood by the EU’s chief negotiator and Barnier’s track record as such seemed — until this week — largely off-limits.
Macron himself regularly paid tribute to Barnier’s work as the bloc’s chief negotiator, calling it a “remarkable job” and “very good” in 2018. “Hats off to him for how he negotiated it,” Nathalie Loiseau, a Renew MEP and former Europe minister for Macron, said back in 2019.