The long and acrimonious Brexit negotiations between the British government and the European Commission representing the 27 member states of the EU succeeded in uniting all the main political parties in France in opposing a similar French exit from the EU. If this seemed to be a ringing endorsement of President Macron's unwavering support for the Union, the Front National, renamed the Rassemblement National in June 2018 by its leader Marine Le Pen, made clear that its change of policy towards membership of the EU was conditional on the latter adopting a protectionist policy in its trade with the rest of the world, and ending the free movement of labour within the European Single Market. With protectionism on the rise across the world, Le Pen's policy was increasingly popular in France, where a growing number of voters were happy to blame the persistently high unemployment and rise in poverty and inequality on immigrants and imports.

As the Covid-19 pandemic began to spread across the world it revealed and widened inequalities both within and between countries. Not only did it expose differences in income and living and working conditions but it deepened the division between the digital and the non-digital economy, thereby revealing the extent of European dependence on the US technology giants that had been its main beneficiaries. There was no European equivalent of Google, Apple, Facebook or Amazon. This was blamed by the French government partly on the tax privileges enjoyed by the US multinationals and partly on the failure of the European Commission to address the problem. Long before the outbreak of Covid-19, indeed since 2013, the French government had been campaigning to win the agreement of the other EU member states to tax the big tech companies in the countries where they made their profits rather than in those where they were headquartered. However, since European tax policies require unanimity, the French were unsuccessful. When Apple and the government of the Republic of Ireland won their appeal against the Commission's demand for a repayment of tax, and with the US opposed to any change in the way that the firms were taxed, the European Commission was unwilling to risk starting a trade war with the US by pressing the case, preferring to leave the issue to the OECD to negotiate.