Le Pen’s core message promises an end to open borders, multiculturalism and free-trade. She has promised to hold a referendum on France’s membership of the EU and vows to limit immigration to 10,000 people per year.

As centre-right candidate Francois Fillon battles a financial scandal, Le Pen could end up facing liberal former banker, Emmanuel Macron – who is running his first ever election campaign. With the first round of voting approaching in April, we will be discussing the significance of this election for France and the EU, and exploring who could come out on top.

Chaired by Jamie Coomarasamy, presenter on World Tonight on Radio 4, Newshour on the BBC World Service and BBC World News. Coomarasamy was formerly a BBC Correspondent in Paris, Warsaw, Moscow and Washington.

Speakers (full panel announced soon)

Natalie Nougayrède is a columnist, leader writer and foreign affairs commentator for The Guardian. She was previously executive editor and managing editor of Le Monde.

Charles Grant CMG is director of the Centre for European Reform (CER). He works on EU foreign and defence policy, Russia, China, the euro and Britain’s relationship with the EU. His biography of Commission President Jacques Delors (“Delors: Inside the House that Jacques Built”) was published by Nicolas Brealey in 1994. In 2004 he became a chevalier of France’s Ordre Nationale du Mérite, and in 2013 a Companion of St Michael and St George (CMG) “for services to European and wider international policy-making”. In 2015 he was awarded the Bene Merito medal by the Polish government and the Star of Italy medal by the Italian government. Charles is a regular contributor to the Financial Times, The Guardian, The New York Times International Edition and many other publications. He can be followed on twitter at @CER_Grant.

Philippe Marlière is a professor of French and European politics at University College London. His publications revolve around the French Left, European social democracy, questions of citizenship, integration and racism in France. He is writing a book on the shift to the right of the republican ideology in contemporary France. He contributes opinion articles to the media, notably The Guardian, openDemocracy, Le Monde and has a blog on Mediapart, the main on line publication in France.

The Frontline Club played host to a heated and at times fractious debate on Brexit and the future of Europe on Thursday 24 March 2016.

The discussion, hosted by BBC Chief Correspondent Gavin Hewitt, considered Brexit – and more generally the European project – in the context of the terrorists attacks that struck Brussels on Tuesday 22 March.

“Europe has had to face up to some of its illusions,” Hewitt said. “With the Eurozone crisis, it has had to face up to the fact that the system it built could not sustain the financial crisis. And with the financial crisis, it had to focus on whether Schengen works.”

Dutch journalist and writer Joris Luyendijk branded Brussels the “tipping point” that will seal the demise of the European project. He argued forcefully for the UK’s exit from Europe, insisting: “the heart of the English was never in it anyway.”

Premium #Brexitainment at the @frontlineclub tonight.
Powerful opening by @JLbankingblog. pic.twitter.com/0BY4JODCug

— Wolfgang Blau (@wblau) March 24, 2016

Luyendijk, who authored Swimming with Sharks: My Journey Into the World of the Bankers, added: “Europe is suffering from chronic problems which together form a crisis. The EU either needs to fall apart or something new should be built.”

Annalisa Piras, journalist, director and producer of The Great European Disaster Movie, is a fierce advocate of the European Union, describing its existence as a historic necessity.” The Italian filmmaker said that the crises Europe is confronting require more cooperation.

“Even if the UK leaves the EU, the threat will grow. ISIS are proving they are growing more and more ambitious and lethal by the day. The only way to respond to that threat is with more cooperation,” she said.

Toby Young rubbished Piras’ assertion: “Closer cooperation is always the answer of federalists.” The associate editor of the Spectator said: “There is a crisis of faith and that is why Europe is dying. European intellectuals have far too much faith in the EU and far too little in nationalism. They exaggerate the role the EU has played in peace, when it is more down to NATO, and don’t recognise that the rise of Islamism is because of a decline in nationalism.”

Natalie Nougayrède suggested that the EU’s failure to tackle the twin refugee and terrorism crises has boosted the far right movement across Europe. “Brussels will bring more energy to those who say each and every nation in Europe needs to bring up the drawbridge,” the Guardian leader writer and former Le Monde managing editor said.

“That is an illusion. European leaders need to send an urgent signal to voters that they are taking steps to finding at least part of the solution.” Nougayrède hailed Angela Merkel’s deal with Turkey which, despite criticism of it as a bilateral deal that undermined unity, was a sign that Europe “was trying to stem the flow of migrants.”

Young, on the other hand, said Merkel had made a series of blunders, the most serious of which was to “lay out the welcome mat for refugees without consultation with European neighbours… in order to expiate German war guilt.”

Young said that Britain’s exit from the EU would hopefully propel the institution towards reform or preferably allow it to “deflate in a peaceable way rather than erupt in violence.”

Piras struck back that “before throwing our toys out the pram”, we should ask how we can fix the European Union. Nougayrède agreed, insisting that the EU may prove to be an “easy punching ball”, but it is not true that the institution cannot reform.

Luyendijk offered a European perspective on Brexit, telling the audience that there is little interest in the UK among European leaders. “The refugee crisis is a big issue, not you,” he said.

Full house @frontlineclub @BBCGavinHewitt @nnougayrede @toadmeister @jorisluyendijk to discuss #brexit seen from EU pic.twitter.com/CLp5bDQPFv

— @annalisap (@Annalisap) March 24, 2016

Asked to give their predictions for how Europe would look in 10 years’ time, Luyendijk said: “We will look back and wonder why we wasted so much time on things like Brexit while other bigger issues were left untouched.”

Piras hoped to “live in a Europe that is better than the one we founded.” She said: “Europe has given us great things and tomorrow we can become better and stronger.”

Gavin Hewitt underlined the strong commitment from European leaders to the project. “Despite successive crises, the establishment won’t row back on the project. Never underestimate their commitment to make the European Union project work.”

Young said that the Leave campaign will “probably win” the European referendum. “I hope it will stimulate other independence movements in other countries which are vital for genuine reform.”

Nougayrède suggested that the EU will pull through despite the challenges it faces. “Enough people are aware that we live in a globalised world. We must act as a collective club, not individual nations. We need to think collectively to shape realities that affect us, not just be submitted to them.”

Bill Emmott and Annalisa Piras following the preview of their new film, The Great European Disaster Movie

“We are in an aeroplane, and we don’t know who is driving the aeroplane. We are in a storm and we don’t know what is happening to us…”. This was the idea that Annalisa Piras wanted to entertain in her new film, The Great European Disaster Movie, which previewed at the Frontline Club on Friday 23 January.

The film combines a fictional narrative, set in a dystopian future without a European Union, with interviews and analysis to demonstrate how both the political and financial union is gradually pulling itself apart. The film will be aired across Europe by eight different broadcasters, a feat Piras described as her “impossible challenge”.

Bill Emmott

Whilst the film was first and foremost an analytical exploration of the current problems that Europe faces, Piras said she felt that something more was needed to engage audiences in the subject.

“The attempt was to experiment a little bit with fiction, with graphics, with other elements in trying to make very complex issues such as the European Union crisis available possibly to a wider public than the one normally interested in reading The Economist or the Financial Times,” she said.

At the heart of the film was an attempt to understand why the European project was slowly falling apart, both economically and politically. Bill Emmott, the film’s executive producer, described it as two different battles: one fought in the head and one fought in the heart.

“The difficulty for the European Union is that so much of what it’s done is stopping you self harming, stopping you subsidise your steel or stopping you have trade barriers… So there’s too much ‘no’ in Europe, and what really the opportunity needs to be is the ‘yes’,” said Emmott.

The film was well received by the audience, with particular praise for the way value was placed on social and identity issues in Europe, rather than exclusively on economic problems.

However, a number of those present questioned the film’s strong pro-European stance. One audience member commented:

“It was ideologically and intellectually highly loaded. You have a number of prominent journalists, intellectuals… all very explicit and putting the case very clearly. And against that you have a very narrow-minded councillor from Margate who is scared of foreigners.”

Annalisa Piras

“We thought if we went into trying to give both sides of the arguments for all these very complex issues we wouldn’t have survived. We would have died in the process,” Piras responded.

“What interested me was to make a provocation… To make it entertaining, to make it scary, to push people to think about this scenario. The tragedy about the current debate is that this [apocalyptic] scenario is never evoked”. In doing this, Piras hoped the film would make viewers consider the potential unintended consequences if the European Union were to dissolve.

The discussion also focused on how much of an impact a partial dismantlement of the Eurozone would have on the economy as a whole. Some commented that a Greek exit would allow both Greece and the rest of Europe to flourish, whilst others predicted economic disaster.

“I think that opportunity and hope really need to be at the heart of what the argument has to be,” said Emmott. “That an open Europe, a Europe that’s connected, that a Europe that’s cooperative has provided, and will in the future provide, opportunities and hope for the people. That’s the argument from the heart surely.”

There was also criticism of the argument that a Europe without the European Union would slide back into war. One member of the audience described this idea as “the old bogeyman” of Europe. However, Piras was confident that this argument had a legitimate place in the film.

“I think that Ukraine is proving that, the fragile peace in the Balkans is proving that. We wanted to finish with the Balkans because we thought that remembering that only twenty years ago people were actually massacring each other on the borders of Europe… They remember the blood and they see Europe as a solution to not going back to the past,” she said.

Asked why the film did not feature comment on the current threat that Russia poses to Europe, Piras commented that she wanted the film to be an introspective analysis on Europe, without too much focus on external developments.

“The film at the end wanted to concentrate more on us, the Europeans, what we think we should do about what we have built in the last 60 years… The attempt was to make a very provocative, intense and strong film about who we are now in Europe, we Europeans, and what we want to do in the future.”

Follow Annalisa Piras and Bill Emmott on Twitter for updates on future screenings of The Great European Disaster Movie.

Bill Emmott and Annalisa Piras

Once more, the power of money and its threat to democracy became the focus at Frontline, where the documentary The Brussels Business was shown on Friday evening and followed by a Q&A with directors Friedrich Moser and Mattieu Lietaert.

The Brussels Business analyzes the European Union’s growing lobby industry in Belgium’s capital, now the world’s second largest lobbying presence behind Washington, D.C.  The movie traces how corporations, rather than politicians, have ultimately pulled the strings in creating and directing the EU’s Monetary Union.  

Co-director Friedrich Moser told the audience:

"We were digging for what was actually the biggest lobby success of the European Union, and it’s the European Union itself."

Olivier Hoedeman, a corporate watchdog based in Brussels, argues in the film that:

"Twenty years of deregulation and liberalization […] a single market, a monetary union… [and downsizing] public services" were all part of a neoliberal agenda that business leaders used the EU to achieve."

In the mid-1990s, Hoedeman began working to expose corporate power in EU lobbying after noticing: 

"So many examples of new policies that were basically captured by industry, by industry lobbying."

During the Q&A, Moser and co-director Matthieu Lietaert emphasized two keys to a democratic EU that isn’t coopted by corporations:  transparency, and fair balance.  Lietaert noted:

"In Brussels, you have six-hundred lobby groups working for corporate interests. [But] you have less than twenty groups in the interest of society and NGOs." 

As Hoedeman asserts in the film:

"The question is: how many of the MEPs are defending the interests of the people, and how many are defending the interests of big business?"

The Brussels Business highlights the failure of European Commissioner Sim Kallas’ initiative to require lobbies to join a transparent register, and it recounts the near-passage of a 1998 law that severely weakened governments’ capacity to pass legislation that constrained corporations.  

The law was blocked only when its contents were leaked and made public, an NGO-fuelled firestorm of protest ensued before the vote, and France finally vetoed it.

The directors ended the evening by sharing their next project: an online game that lets users "play the lobbyist," thus engaging citizens with the weekly votes and debates in the European Parliament. Lietaert explained:

"You go online, and you start voting […]  Suddenly we tell Brussels, ‘hey, we’re watching you, and here is our voice.’  And then you can enter a dialogue […]  This is, for us, one of the big problems with democracy in Brussels […] there is no dialogue any more.  With the internet, we create that.  It would be 5, maybe ten minutes per week […] We are looking for funding for that."

Interestingly, condemnation of Berlusconi’s media involvement was not wholesale. Paolo Mancini, professor at the University of Perugia said:

“Everyone here will expect me to say one thing but I don’t think Berlusconi is controlling the media. It’s overstated.”

“Berlusconi tried to limit freedom of journalists but he did not succeed because there was the opposition press, particularly the print media,” agreed Gianpietro Mazzoleni, University of Milan academic. “RAI 3 constantly make shows that have continued to alert people against Berlusconi.”

Mattia Bagnoli, UK correspondent at the Italian news agency ANSA opposed:

“I must say he controlled much of the Italian media for a long time. We are not talking about news here but we are talking about culture and reality shows. What’s on television is a reflection of what he projects on to Italian people to enjoy life.”

“He had control in the media not only through television but also through print in the form of advertising through his company Mondadori,” he added.

As with all modern European countries, most Italians depend on television for their source of news and information. So was Berlusconi clever in choosing his medium?

Marco Niada, a former London bureau chief of the political and financial Italian daily Il Sole 24 Ore, said:

“He knows many Italian people don’t read. He thought without imposing too much influence through papers he could control them through TV. However, he started to be defeated by technology. He was still stuck to terrestrial TV and social media started to take over.”

It didn’t take long for the lurid saga of Berlusconi’s bunga bunga parties to surface. An Italian documentary director in the audience, pointed out coverage of the scandal in mainstream Italian TV media was poor, saying most people relied on the internet. Meanwhile a reporter from the Financial Times in the audience defended the Italian news output:

“Don’t make the Italian media sound clandestine. La Repubblica went all out to cover the scandal extensively for days.”

Bagnoli added, “As an Italian news agency we are obliged to cover it impartially and we did.”

The discussion swiftly moved into the future of Italian media, now that Berlusconi is gone. Bagnoli and Mazzoleni weren’t entirely optimistic, as they feel many of the Italian MPs are still linked to Berlusconi.

“Mario Monti is here just to bring the country back from default. They need to rewrite the constitution for RAI,” said Bagnoli.

“The Monti factor is crucial at this point,” said Mazzoleni. “We don’t know about the future but we can guess, Monti will take the opportunity to reform RAI but he will be cautious.”

Coming back to the question of press freedom, Hewlett asked whether a more liberal Italian media is possible in five years. Niada said, “The worst enemies of press freedom are journalists themselves, it will take more than five years.”

As the Leveson Enquiry uncovers more evidence of press corruption in the UK, these words may ring true for the British and Italian news industries alike.

By Will Turvill

The Frontline Club last night hosted a lively and informative discussion on what the future might hold for Italian media in the post-Berlusconi era.

The event was hosted by BBC Radio 4 presenter Steve Hewlett who was joined on the panel by four Italians and an Anglo-Italian lecturer from the London School of Economics.

First attempting to determine the state of the media prior to Silvio Berlusconi’s resignation in November, Paolo Mancini, professor at the University of Perugia, claimed the common belief about the Prime Minister’s control is overstated:

 “There is a common wisdom that Italy does not have a free press – but it does,” he said. “I’m not a fan of Berlusconi, but I don’t think he controlled the media fully.”

In agreement with him was University of Milan academic Gianpietro Mazzoleni, whose research interests lie in media policies and political communication:

 “I share [Mancini’s] scepticism about this common knowledge. He tried to limit the freedom of this media, yes, but he did not succeed.”

“Of course Berlusconi didn’t control everything,” said the LSE’s Damian Tambini, who suggested that host Hewlett had taken the wrong approach to the issue:

“The more interesting question for us to answer,” Tambini proposed, “is did he control too much? The answer is yes.”

Marco Niada interjected that the former Prime Minister’s fall came not only due to the “eurocrisis”, but because he failed to take control of all the media:

“He is unable to control new forms of media,” said Niada, a former London bureau chief of the political and financial Italian daily Il Sole 24 Ore. “He started to be undermined by new media – social networking defeated Berlusconi.”

Although the panel was in agreement that Berlusconi would be unlikely to return to the strength he once was, none could say exactly what the future might hold for the media under his replacement Mario Monti.

“Italy has a new government,” said ANSA journalist Mattia Bernado Bagnoli, “We are only now starting to appreciate how things work in a normal country.”

In association with Open Society Foundations and the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism

On 12 November the longest-serving post-war Prime Minister of Italy Silvio Berlusconi resigned after losing his majority and public support.

While no longer Prime Minister, he continues to control one half of the countries terrestrial TV market and his company Media Set is a big player in the print and advertising sectors. What will Berlusconi’s influence be and will he still be able to shape the agenda through his party and media ownership?

We will be bringing together a panel of experts to discuss the future of the media in Italy.How will the channels he owns fair now he doesn’t have a hand in legislative decisions that affect them and what control will he wield over state funded channels?

Join us to discuss the future of his media empire and the prospects of Italy or the EU bringing in legislation to break up his media empire and prevent such a monopoly existing?

With:

Paolo Mancini, professor at Dipartimento Istituzioni e Società, Facoltà di Scienze Politiche, Università di Perugia. His scientific interests are focused on political communication and more generally on the relationship between politics and communication. While at the Reuters Institute Mancini is working on a project trying to interpret under a new light the political adventure of Silvio Berlusconi and to place it within the new forms that political participation is undertaking in different parts of the world.

Antonio Caprarica, a journalist and essayist Italian, he is the British correspondent for Rai.

Gianpietro Mazzoleni, professor of sociology of communication and of political communication at the University of Milan, Italy, where he coordinates the post-graduate courses in communication in the Faculty of Political Sciences. He is member of the editorial boards of the European Journal of Communication and of Political Communication and editor of the Italian scholarly journal Comunicazione Politica. His research interests focus especially on media policies and political communication.

Damian Tambini, senior lecturer in the department of media and communications at LSE and convenor of the MSC in Communication Regulation and Policy.  He is an Associate Fellow at the Institute for Public Policy Research (IPPR), at the Oxford Internet Institute and at the Centre for Socio-Legal Studies. He co-edited Cyberdemocracy and Citizenship, Markets, and the State. Other recent and forthcoming publications include: Nationalism in Italian Politics, New News: Impartial Broadcasting in the Digital Age, Privacy and the Media and Codifying Cyberspace.

Additional panelists to be confirmed.

Picture credit: Alessio85

By Rebecca Omonira-Oyekanmi

The rise of China, not Islamist terrorism, is the story of our time, declared Timothy Garton Ash at the Frontline Club last night.

If you missed the event, you can watch the whole thing here…

“It is groundhog day… One wakes up and it is the same old ding dong on the Today programme, the same old arguments being wheeled out. I feel I could hibernate for 10 years and I would come back and the British would still be having the same ludicrous European argument.”

“I can’t believe we are so stupid … we have got a British Europe, the only people who don’t realise are the British.”

“It was an extraordinary conversation … Cheney was there, Condi was there. He had made his mind up about only two things; one was missile defence and the other was climate change.

“He said Kyoto was mush … and ‘I think the Europeans are trying to screw us’. Islamist terrorists did not get a mention. Here was a man… groping for a narrative. 9/11 gave him that narrative.”