It will be, for LR, a bad time to go through, one more. On March 6 and 7, Eric Ciotti’s party will participate in the congress of the European People’s Party, which will support Ursula Von der Leyen for a second term as president of the European Commission – she will therefore be the leader of the European right for the June elections. Except that François-Xavier Bellamy announced that he would not line up behind Ursula von der Leyen. This is not going to help clarify the political line of the French right.
“The only thing we assume in this commission is Thierry Breton, confides the head of the list. In 2019, the EPP won, Manfred Weber was our candidate but it is Emmanuel Macron who with Viktor Orban prevents this scenario . Ursula Von der Leyen did not know three weeks before that she would play a role in the European institutions!”
The list of criticisms is long, first and foremost the attitude on the famous agricultural issue, which she did not even mention during her inauguration speech five years ago. “The European Union was dominated, during the mandate which is ending, on agricultural issues in particular, by a majority which ultimately went from the extreme left to the Macronist elected officials”, we denounce to LR. “Supporting her would be an invaluable gift to Jordan Bardella,” adds a party MEP.
It’s called playing politics. “We are going to stage our disagreement with her, but without having an alternative candidate, explains an LR leader. It is a rant on our part, which will not prevent us from having her in our hands: we are will say she is from our party and we will talk to Bardella about the AfD [NDLR, le parti allemand d’extrême droite, qui figure dans son groupe]. Everyone will have their own ball and chain.”
However, we must appreciate the historical nature of this choice. In 2001, the RPR, at the initiative of Nicolas Sarkozy, joined the EPP, before, the following year, the UMP, which brings together the RPR and the UDF and therefore embodies the French right, did likewise. This year, in a major, even existential, decision, LR broke with the EPP and broke with what was for a long time its sister party, the CDU. “I attended Franco-German meetings with Ursula Von der Leyen,” says former minister Dominique Bussereau. “She was really the favorite of Angela Merkel, the chancellor who was the partner of both Jacques Chirac and Nicolas Sarkozy.”
A turning point? What turning point? Among the Republicans, we minimize. Geoffroy Didier led LR’s European campaign in 2019. He remembers: “As such, I had to monitor what the EPP wrote in its manifesto. I went to Brussels on several occasions to express our total disagreement with the fundamental options of the EPP, such as its desire to set up a European army or to continue the enlargement of the Union. The European political parties to which the national parties adhere are more a body of values than a programmatic fabric.”
Does this mean that LR, despite its weakness, will tomorrow seek to build other types of alliances within the European Parliament, like the RPR in its time, condemning itself to marginality? François-Xavier Bellamy hopes after the June election “a great moment of recomposition”. “We are not on the fringes, but on the sides. We are not calling into question our belonging to the EPP, we want to have influence within it,” tempers a leaver.
The beam works in Brussels and Strasbourg. Because there is one point where LR’s reasoning is unstoppable: Ursula Von der Leyen will in fact be supported by the Macronists. “She signed her crime because she went to the Renaissance campus in Bordeaux in September 2023, underlines a right-wing elected official. She comes from the EPP like Bruno Le Maire of LR: this does not mean that the options that it implements are consistent with what we want.” It is therefore, logically, the Elysée which takes its defense. “She has failed neither on Covid nor on Ukraine, recalls an advisor to Emmanuel Macron. The Brussels Commission has been a partner. Yes, we have points of divergence, which sometimes go as far as arm wrestling sometimes, but we will never denounce Europe.” It’s been a long time since European construction has been a dream, and the coming campaign will struggle to reverse the trend.