dismissed by LR, he refuses to leave his post

The head of the Republicans was excluded from the party by the unanimous decision of the members of the political bureau. But Eric Ciotti, who has locked himself in the party headquarters in Paris, refuses to leave his functions.

The sentence has fallen. The Republican political bureau decided to exclude Eric Ciotti from the party at the end of its meeting urgently convened this Wednesday, June 12 by the general secretary, Annie Genevard. It remains to apply the decision or rather to impose it on the president of the traditional right party dismissed by his peers.

The decision of the LR political office is not a surprise. Since this morning, party members have expressed their desire to see Eric Ciotti pushed towards the exit door. “Éric Ciotti will no longer be president of the Republicans at 3 p.m.,” even said Senator Agnès Evren on BFMTV. The Republican president’s mistake was to propose an alliance between his party and the far-right National Rally on the TF1 news set on June 11. A real outcry which imploded the party, deeply dividing its ranks between, on the one hand, those who support this agreement with Jordan Bardella with a view to the early legislative elections, and on the other, those who violently oppose it, tenors LR in the lead. Opponents of a rapprochement with the extreme right being in the majority.

Eric Ciotti reacted in just a few minutes to the political bureau’s decision: “I am and remain the president of our political party, elected by the members!” The deputy denies any legal value to the decision taken during the meeting organized, according to him, “in flagrant violation of our statutes”.

Ciotti cloistered inside the LR seat

Eric Ciotti has no intention of letting this happen. The president of the LR has not tried all means since Wednesday morning to prevent the political bureau meeting from taking place, the sole purpose of which is to rule on exclusion, or to deprive the decision that should result from it of any legal value.

After refusing to resign, Eric Ciotti announced, through a party press release, that the political bureau convened this afternoon did not meet “the political requirements of our statutes and our internal regulations”. The statutes provide that a political bureau can only be convened by the president or at the request of a quarter of the members of the National Council.

The deputy went so far as to lock himself inside the Republican headquarters after ordering all the permanent staff to leave the building. “I hear a lot of nonsense about the closure of the LR headquarters,” wrote Eric Ciotti around 1 p.m. on Furthermore, no meeting was ever scheduled at headquarters this afternoon.”

However, the members of the political bureau still met not far from LR headquarters, in the 7th arrondissement, to decide despite everything on the fate of their boss. “We are among the crazy,” Aurélien Pradié lamented to the press: “We are in a democracy: people who lock themselves in an office and say ‘I will never come out’, that doesn’t exist” . And the LR deputy joked: “We have until Sunday to organize a CNI (investiture committee, Editor’s note), we will call the Samu, we will call Jordan Bardella to get him out of his office”.