A curious team. On January 18, 2023, the new boss of the Republicans (LR) Éric Ciotti presents his organization chart. The time has come for synthesis. Two vice-presidents are appointed to support the Nice resident: Aurélien Pradié, champion of a social right, and François-Xavier Bellamy, holding a liberal-conservative line. Of this alliance of opposites, nothing remains. Or so little. Éric Ciotti is a leader on borrowed time, hounded by his camp after his alliance with the National Rally.
Aurélien Pradié, dismissed from his position during the pension reform, has decided to leave the party. “LR is in an inextricable situation. Gaullism is not dead, it is more alive than ever, but LR is dead,” he announced to La Dépêche du Midi. The man has long oscillated between internal overhaul and appeal from the open sea. Afraid of losing his Lot constituency, anchored on the left? Party lockdown? The second option won. “The structure is impossible to move. Too heavy,” laments a relative.
The candidate for the legislative elections will run under the banner of his micro-party “Du Courage”, like 30 other contenders. François-Xavier Bellamy stays at home. But the MEP measured during the European elections the harmful weight of the LR label. “A difficult barrier to get around,” he admitted recently. When he obtained 7% of the vote on June 9, the right thanked him for having limited the catastrophe promised to the party. This brand, the LR candidates for the legislative elections do not want it. They all rely on their local roots to survive the dissolution and hide the disastrous logo.
“We haven’t been the right for a long time”
The story accelerates. The UMP lived for twelve years before being condemned to death by the Bygmalion affair. LR did not wait for his tenth birthday to be transferred to palliative care. The party offers France the spectacle of division and scenes close to vaudeville. Above all, he exposes his existential crisis, which began the day after the 2017 presidential election and has never been stopped since.
The heir of the RPR has long clung to two branches to convince himself of his future. The party claims a monopoly on the right, a current of opinion considered to be in the majority in the country. Since we are THE right, the people will eventually return home, tired of the Macronist or Frontist adventure. “But we haven’t been the right for a long time,” laments former minister Jean-François Copé. Its voters have firmly anchored themselves to the central bloc or the National Rally. The sociological homogeneity of the first and the aggiornamento of the second have made them lasting welcoming lands. Jumping out of your chair like a kid saying “right!” not enough.
And then, LR holds on to its comfort blanket. That of “government party”. No matter the ambiguity of the formula: LR calls upon this quality, a survival of a glorious past, to justify its existence. The party has maintained this illusion, a remedy for the absence of doctrinal refoundation. It is measured by micro-details. These letters from Éric Ciotti to the head of state, written on the calligraphic model of the letters from the Elysée. This counter-government opposed to Élisabeth Borne’s team. Or this putative candidate for the Elysée Laurent Wauquiez, taking refuge in silence like de Gaulle in Colombey. The party refuses the slightest alliance and stands on a line of independence, the key to its return to power. “The LR who have been in the wake of the exercise of power think that it is in their genes that they have a vocation to exercise it,” smiles a Macronist strategist. The right, founder of the Fifth Republic, governing by divine right?
“I don’t want to shine in Paris, but at home”
When you have such ambitions, you have to be readable. The relative majority has shone the spotlight on the National Assembly in 2022. LR deputies have become the face of the party. This pivotal role was a poisoned chalice. He offered the party a disproportionate role. The Republicans needed serenity to rebuild themselves, their contradictions were affirmed in the cauldron of the hemicycle.
© / The Express
As during the examination of the pension reform, the height of ideological confusion between the leadership of the movement and the rank-and-file deputies. 61 elected officials with restricted sociology. Exit urban areas and large cities: these elected officials, mainly from working-class and rural areas, were only an incomplete representation of the right-wing people. “I don’t want to shine in Paris, but at home,” says Côte-d’Or MP Hubert Brigand one day at a group meeting. The sentence is as cruel as it is fair. It reveals a group with relative ideological coherence. Its members, driven by a strong feeling of independence, reflecting diverse electoral sociologies. “Those who survive the elections will think they are Carpathian geniuses and will be untenable,” jokes a manager. “It can only be cacophonous.”
This cacophony goes beyond the Palais-Bourbon. A strategic schizophrenia is taking over the party. Éric Ciotti swore in private that he wanted to seduce the Macronist right-wing electorate, but developed an offer close to that of the RN in sovereign matters. On March 23, the right met in Aubervilliers for the launch of the European campaign. Vibrant appeals are launched to the French, once seduced by the head of state. Suddenly, the tile. Céline Imart, second on the list, is proud of not having voted against Marine Le Pen in 2017 and 2022. Please follow.
The right sets itself an objective, but its words say the opposite. Those who can pronounce them are no longer there. Of “the right and the center” – historical martingale – only the first remains. “The Juppé and Bussereau have left, notes an LR advisor. The specter has narrowed after the defeats or the affairs.” And what about the reactions to the alliance between Eric Ciotti and the RN? François-Xavier Bellamy and former MEP Geoffroy Didier have publicly condemned their president. The first, however, affirms that he would vote – “of course” – RN against the left in the second round of the legislative elections. The second, candidate for the legislative elections in Hauts-de-Seine, is proudly displayed on X with a former contender “Reconquête”, the formation of Eric Zemmour. Please understand.
What singularity?
“The justification of a party is its usefulness,” former Minister of the Interior Brice Hortefeux is accustomed to saying. What is unique about the Republicans? The party has not initiated a profound ideological overhaul, despite the launch of the Estates General of uncertain scope. His diptych – economic liberalism and regal firmness – is too common to offer him oxygen. Especially since the National Rally, through programmatic renunciations, is getting closer to the ex-UMP. The right has stopped opposing a discourse of values to the RN, opposing it with a simple economic contradiction. She thus exposed herself to the attacks of a party with absolute intellectual plasticity, which polished its economic discourse in two weeks.
Ideological fog on one side. Lack of singularity of the other. This vagueness is also the product of the absence of a presidential figure in a party that loves verticality. Laurent Wauquiez, in retreat from the media, is not yet the incontestable leader expected by Les Républicains. This emptiness nourishes a feeling of internal freedom, specific to confusion. The former minister chose to return to the arena, three years before the presidential election. His presidential ambition is intact. But nothing says that it will have a dying party as its vehicle.
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