Yalta, 2019
Andréa Kotarac, born in 1989, grew up in Haute Savoie in southern France, an area bordering both Switzerland and Italy. His father was Serbian and his mother was Iranian. He studied law and had been an activist for most of his adult life, starting in the Socialist Party, then moving to the Parti de gauche, then to Jean Luc Mélenchon’s La France Insoumise, founded in 2016. His ties to Mélenchon put him on the list for the regional elections of Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes in the southeast, and he had won, in December 2015, becoming a member of the regional council. He ran for the National Assembly in 2017, for the Rhône department, and lost in the first round. In May, 2019, he announced on BFMTV that he was going to support the National Rally party list, led by current RN president Jordan Bardella, for the elections to the European parliament, rather than the LFI list led by Manon Aubry. It was an open break with the party, after a long period of tension.
In his appearance on television, Kotarac stated that the decisive issues for him had been “several events” at Yalta, where he had accepted Vladimir Putin’s invitation to the 5th economic summit at Yalta in May, 2019. And his decision to leave the LFI, finally, was likely not voluntary.
These Yalta summits began in 2015, after Putin had seized Crimea from Ukraine in late 2014, an act that had brought a round of international economic sanctions against Russia. Yalta had another meaning for Putin, as well, in reference to the Yalta meeting in February, 1945, among Franklin D. Roosevelt, Winston Churchill, and Joseph Stalin, to shape the postwar world. Putin has long made clear his ambitions for a “New Yalta,” a reshaping of collective security and regional influence, to reflect Russia’s (or Putin’s) ambitions.
Numerous African leaders were at this 2019 conference, as well as European parties of the extreme right, including the AfD from Germany, the Vlaams Belang from Belgium, the FPO from Austria, though not Orbán of Hungary. Marine Le Pen had been invited, but had declined; but Marion Maréchal Le Pen, her niece, had accepted, as had Thierry Mariani, who.headed the list for the regional elections in Paca in 2020 (and lost); Thierry was (and is) an MEP and leading RN member.
Questioned about his attendance, Kotarac stated that he was in disagreement with Mariani and Maréchal on many subjects, but agreed with them on two things: national sovereignty (to be interpreted as an anti-EU remark); and the need to ally with Russia. He attempted to refine the bluntness of those remarks, originally spoken to Le Monde, in a subsequent interview with L’Obs, in which he reaffirmed his beliefs as a souverainiste, and noted that “Our [LFI] program evokes an altermondialiste alliance with BRICS to escape from the logic of the International Monetary Fund. I remind certain leftists that the R of BRICS does not stand for Rungis but for Russia.” (BRICS stands for Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa). Mélenchon had often invoked these five nations as an alternative to the Atlantic alliance, and the neoliberal agenda of such agencies of the IMF, a position reminiscent of the non-aligned nations of the late 20th century.) [1]
Arnaud Le Gall, who had drafted the LFI position on foreign policy, stated that the party was “not at all” in agreement with Marion Maréchal–the difference was that the “Front National” (as he called it) belief in national sovereignty was as an end in itself, while LFI believed in “popular sovereignty,” presumably a reference to their call for a “Sixth Republic” with power shifted to the elected Assembly, as well as an extensive use of the citizens’ referendum to decide major issues. Further, the FN vision was identitaire, that is, a view of ethnic European nationalism and a support for French culture, as opposed to the LFI’s multicultural orientation. In regard to Russia, Le Gall said, “We [the LFI] have never spoken of an alliance with Russia but of cooperation. Words have meaning. For us [LFI], Russia is neither an enemy nor an ally, but a potential partner.” Le Gall went further in an interview with Sputnik News, in which he stated that he wished for a France “neither pro-Russia, nor pro-American, [but] simply independent and which manages its interests on the European continent in partnership with Russia.”[2]
The LFI, in spite of a half-hearted call for neutrality, had tended to lean towards Russia. In regard to the annexation of Crimea, they had called for the UN to organize an international conference to determine the border between Russia and Ukraine, adding that Russia’s annexation was “in reaction” to the US “maneuvers” in supporting the “so-called Ukrainian ‘revolution [in 2014]’” only because it served US purposes in its “aggressive extension of NATO” towards Russia’s borders. (That argument would become a familiar one after Russia’s attack on Ukraine in 2022.) Kotarac, who had appeared in March 2019 on Russia Today, two months before his Crimea trip, stated that Europeans should simply accept the fact “that Crimea belongs to Russia.” LFI had made no public pronouncement after this excursion to Crimea, but “someone close to Jean-Luc Mélenchon” stated that “The movement sent no one to this forum and does not approve of this voyage. Andréa Kotarac does not define the international policy of the LFI,” adding, less formally, “he made a connerie. We won’t take him back.”[3]
The Yalta Conference was not the first time Kotarac had embarrassed his party. In May 2018, Kotarac (again surprising the LFI) had gone to Donbass, a region in eastern Ukraine led by pro-Russian separatists, who called it the Peoples’ Republic of Donetsk. He had met president Alexandre Zakharchenco, killed in August in an explosion in Donetsk. At that time, speaking on RT France [Russia Today, the Russian government-backed channel, recently shut down in France]–and speaking as a regional councilor of LFI–Kotarac expressed concern that this assassination, which Russia blamed on Ukraine, had killed a leader “loved by the people,” an act which would surely escalate the Russian-Ukrainian conflict. Suggesting that “a not insignificant line had been crossed,” he noted that Zakharchenko was one of the signatories of the Minsk accords in 2015–accords that, he suggested, had not been respected. He had added, finally, that Jean-Luc Mélenchon had frequently “sounded the alarm” on the Ukrainian question.[4]
Shortly after this, Andréa Kotarac was taken into the National Rally. And he rose quickly. He became the parliamentary assistant for Hervé Juvin, elected to the European Parliament on Jordan Bardella’s RN list. Juvin was an author, a contributor to the extreme right journal Élements, and an advisor to Marine Le Pen on matters of environmentalism (transformed, in RN politics, into anti-globalist localism). Juvin and Kotarac had met on the stump for the Europeans, on the sacred ground of Hénin-Beaumont. (Hénin-Beaumont, in Pas-de-Calais, was the site of the FN’s 2014 breakthrough into local elections in the north.) On that occasion, after his public support for Bardella’s list, the personable Kotarac spoke, with one particularly memorable statement: “If my grandparents shed their blood against Nazism, they did not do it for the sake of écriture inclusive [inclusive writing] or communautarisme [sectarianism.]”[5]
Before the European parliament session and his duties with Juvin began, Kotarac was invited by two RN eurodeputies, Thierry Mariani and Nicolas Bay, and Virginie Joron, head of the RN caucus in the Great East region of France, to a conference in Syria, described by Mariani as engaged in a courageous battle against Islamic terrorists. Kotarac had a two hour interview with Bachar al-Assad, and stated, upon his return, that “Assad is in the process of winning the war against the Islamistes with [the help of] the Russians and the Iranians, and from this standpoint I feel closer to him than I do to [former Foreign Minister] Laurent Fabius.” Once again Kotarac had gone on his own, without telling Juvin, who declined to comment.[6]
In the regional elections of 2021, the National Rally finally settled on Andrea Kotarac to head their list, the last regional list to be agreed upon. (Kotarac had been a regional councilor for LFI from the 2015 elections, a position he had resigned after changing parties.) The choice had not been uncontroversial. Marine Le Pen was strongly in his favor as were the two mayors Steeve Briois (Hénin-Beaumont) and David Rachline (Fréjus) and the deputy Bruno Bilde, all of them part of Marine’s inner circle. Others preferred Alexis Jolly, who was later chosen by the party for the National Assembly in 2022 (and won). Some thought that Kotarac, in the party for barely a year, did not deserve to head up the regional lists. There were also strategic concerns, because Lyon, the largest city in the region, had a strong Catholic voting bloc, who would not be sympathetic to Kotarac’s LFI past. Marion Maréchal, representing this traditionalist wing of the Right, had founded her school, l’Issep, in Lyon, and some believed it would make more sense to play to that loyalty.[7]
By 2022, Andréa Kotarac was ready to be more blunt in his assessment of his former party, accusing the LFI and other parties on the Left for their “islamo-gauchisme.”[8] In April 2022, between the two rounds of the presidential election, he criticized the concession speech of Jean-Luc Mélenchon, who had called for “not one vote for Mme Le Pen” in the second round. He also noted the understandable exhaustion of voters who were tired of being called to “faire barrage” against Le Pen, adding that there was no longer any left or right, but simply “globalists and localists.” Wisely, he did not fall prey to the Zemmourist temptation–also strongly pro-Russian–in the 2022 presidential elections. He remains a member of the National Rally.[9]
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[1] Nicolas Ruisseau. “A Yalta, en Crimée, la Russie réunit ses soutiens de tout bord,” Le Monde, April 20, 2019, https://www.lemonde.fr/international/article/2019/04/20/a-yalta-en-crimee-la-russie-reunit-ses-soutiens-de-tout-bord_5452904_3210.html; and Rémy Dodet, “La présence d’un élu dans un forum pro-Poutine embarrasse La France insoumise,” L’Obs, May 4, 2019. https://www.nouvelobs.com/politique/20190504.OBS12462/la-presence-d-un-elu-insoumis-dans-un-forum-pro-poutine-embarasse-la-france-insoumise.html
[2] Mathieu Périsse, “La France insoumise recadre un élu lyonnais après son voyage en Crimée,” Mediacités, May 2, 2019. https://www.mediacites.fr/enquete/lyon/2019/05/02/la-france-insoumise-recadre-un-elu-lyonnais-apres-son-voyage-en-crimee/
[3] Rémy Dodet, “La présence d’un élu dans un forum pro-Poutine embarrasse La France insoumise,” L’Obs, May 4, 2019. https://www.nouvelobs.com/politique/20190504.OBS12462/la-presence-d-un-elu-insoumis-dans-un-forum-pro-poutine-embarasse-la-france-insoumise.html. The Ukraine Maidan revolution in February 2014 resulted in the ouster of a pro-Russian president and a return to the 2004 constitution.
[4] “Le meurtre de Zakharchenko entraîne le conflit ukrainien ‘vers l’une des pires voies possibles,’” RT France, August 31, 2018. https://francais.rt.com/international/53656-meurtre-zakharchenko-entraine-conflit-ukrainien-pire-voire. The Minsk Accords called for an immediate ceasefire, the decentralization of Ukraine with self-government for Donetsk and Luhansk, the removal of heavy weapons from “both sides,” among other things. It broke down almost immediately, with violations by both sides.
[5] Ivanne Trippenbach, “Andrea Kotarac devient assistant parlementaire européen du RN,” L’Opinion, September 2, 2019. https://www.lopinion.fr/politique/andrea-kotarac-devient-assistant-parlementaire-europeen-du-rn Inclusive writing in France is not limited to pronouns, but rather to correcting the non-inclusivity of male-only nouns and adjectives to describe mixed groups. See https://www.epfl.ch/schools/enac/about/diversity-office/inclusive-language/french-inclusive-language-gender/ for a quick primer.
[6] Ivanne Trippenbach, “Andrea Kotarac devient assistant parlementaire européen du RN,” L’Opinion, September 2, 2019. https://www.lopinion.fr/politique/andrea-kotarac-devient-assistant-parlementaire-europeen-du-rn The reference to Fabius, President François Hollande’s Minister of Foreign Affairs, refered to Fabius’ anger with President Barack Obama for refusing military action in 2013, even when Assad crossed “the red line” by gassing his people in 2013. Celestine Bohlen, “A Turning Point for Syrian War, and U.S. Credibility,” The New York Times, February 22, 2016.
[7] Robin D’Angelo, “Régionales en Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes: le Rassemblement national choisit un ex-Insoumis dans la douleur,” Le Journal du Dimanche, March 9, 2021.https://www.lejdd.fr/Politique/regionales-en-auvergne-rhone-alpes-le-rassemblement-national-choisit-un-ex-insoumis-dans-la-douleur-4029789
[8] Ève Moulinier, “L’ex-Insoumis Andréa Kotarac, atout du RN pour le second tour?” Le Dauphiné, April 12, 2022.https://c.ledauphine.com/elections/2022/04/12/l-ex-insoumis-andrea-kotarac-atout-du-rn-pour-le-second-tour
[9]Ève Moulinier, “L’ex-Insoumis Andréa Kotarac, atout du RN pour le second tour?” Le Dauphiné, April 12, 2022.https://c.ledauphine.com/elections/2022/04/12/l-ex-insoumis-andrea-kotarac-atout-du-rn-pour-le-second-tour
