It is Tuesday, June 11, around the middle of the day. Christelle*, a historic employee of the Les Républicains party, comes down the stairs of 4 place du Palais Bourbon, in tears. This long-time activist, already there at the time of the RPR, cannot contain her emotion when she passes in front of the portraits of the historical figures of the French republican right: Philippe Séguin, Charles Pasqua, Valérie Giscard d’Estaing… Without doubt must resonate in his mind the words of Jacques Chirac, the day after the first round of the presidential election in 2002: “Faced with intolerance and hatred, there is no possible transaction, no possible compromise, no possible debate.”
Since then, there has been La Manif pour tous, the political recomposition of 2017, the Zemmour phenomenon, the meteoric rise of Bardella… and then the hammer blow: Eric Ciotti, president of LR, decided to engage his party in an alliance with the National Rally, plunging the Republicans into one of the most serious crises in their history.
If adversaries and external observers are amused by this vaudeville, activists and sympathizers are distressed. “It feels like an episode of The Officeit’s ridiculous”, tells us the departmental head of Jeunes LR Yvelines, Julien Abbas. Dominique, a retired Burgundian farmer who has always voted for the right-wing government parties, confirms: “In form, it is absolutely execrable… How can we imagine that a party leader would make such an important decision without consulting his political office?”
Fracture between the activist base and the executives
Everything suggests that the famous “republican medical cordon” remains, more than ever, relevant. How can we doubt it, after the series of indignant reactions from party executives, Annie Génevard, Valérie Pécresse, Gérard Larcher, Florence Portelli, Xavier Bertrand, and others who met in political office to dismiss Eric Ciotti from office? “We cannot deal with the extremes”, such is the watchword of the Republican leaders, who want to give the image of a united party against a decision taken unilaterally.
Behind the image, the reality is quite different: the party is crossed by numerous divisions. Starting with the divide between the activist base and the executives. This is what the tensions reported to L’Express by many activists and sympathizers suggest. Jean*, a regional leader of the Young Republicans, reportedly received threats from the political office urging him to publicly position himself against Eric Ciotti, otherwise he would risk losing his position. “They want to force us to participate in this sad spectacle. These are authoritarian methods, one would say LFI…”, he is indignant.
Far from sacred union, activists observe that on the ground, the unanimity that reigns among party executives is not shared. This is for example what Gaétan, a young activist from Ile-de-France, says, for whom “there is an obvious difference between the activist base, where it is generally 50/50, and the party executives “. This is also Jean’s experience: “The young people around me, even the most centrist, have the feeling of being betrayed by the big leaders of the party. There are more and more of them who support Ciotti.” However, we must distinguish activists from voters. Overall, the latter remained faithful to the party’s traditional ideological line, which explains why 53% of Valérie Pécresse’s voters decided to vote for Emmanuel Macron rather than Marine Le Pen in the second round of the last presidential election (Ipsos-Sopra Steria survey of April 24, 2022).
The end of a taboo?
What if the activist base was already ready for the “union of the rights” that Eric Ciotti is calling for? This is the conviction of Alexandre Pesey, founder of the IFP (Institute of Political Training, conservative Catholic), an organization which has set itself the objective of training and networking future personalities of the right: “Chez the LR activists that we meet at the IFP, in private a majority of them want union, and it is growing in strength, there is a real enthusiasm. The expression that keeps coming up, about Ciotti. , that’s it.”
Would Eric Ciotti’s controversial decision only politically reflect the reality of the activist base? This is what emerges from the majority of exchanges with the activists and supporters contacted. Of course, not everyone is in favor of union. This is what Julien Abbas recalls: “There are two fringes, those who want the alliance, and those who want to remain independent.” But the whole issue lies precisely in the vagueness which surrounds the posture of “independence”. If they do not want an alliance with the RN, that does not necessarily mean that they consider the members of the far-right party to be unfriendly.
Firstly because for a certain number of them, it is the form which is more disturbing than the idea of considering working with the RN. This is what Bruno*, a former head office employee and activist in the Somme, tells us: “The big problem is the method, the way it was done.” In fact, their opposition to Marine Le Pen’s party is not so much based on the conviction that a world separates the two parties, but rather on the desire to preserve the autonomy and specific identity of LR, not to ” sacrifice the Gaullist heritage”, Gaétan tells us.
Fundamentally, criticism of the RN is limited. The days of Jacques Chirac’s diatribes are long gone. For these activists, there is no need to fight a party “dangerous for the Republic”. What prevents any alliance is above all the economic program of the RN, considered too “statist”. “If uniting the rights means applying the economic program of the RN…”, says Bruno, dubiously. This lukewarm criticism, Marc*, a former employee of the headquarters opposed to the union of the rights, observed it during the European campaign: “When it was necessary to find arguments against the RN, often, it was the syndrome from the blank page…
LFI, the new foil
At LR, “everything except the extremes” was replaced by “everything except the New Popular Front or Macronism”. For Marc, this new reality is difficult to get through, to the point of pushing him to surrender his card on Tuesday June 11: “As a grassroots activist, I am stunned that the response of the resistance to Ciotti is the line of independence, and that almost no one dares to talk about a coalition with Horizons at the national level. For me, the “neither-nor” line is agreeing to give constituencies to the RN. Indeed, if the alliance with the RN is not unanimous, “neither nor” sounds obvious to activists. Julien Abbas clearly assumes this: “My adversaries are the New Popular Front and Macron. The others are competitors, but not adversaries.”
The revulsion aroused by the President of the Republic may be surprising, when we know that many former LR activists and political executives today belong to the central bloc. “They are still on the liturgy of treachery. Eric Woerth, Bruno Le Maire, Edouard Philippe, Christophe Béchu, they are all traitors… But none of them asked themselves the question of knowing if the direction that LR was taking today was not a betrayal of Valérie Giscard d’Estaing or Chirac?” laments Marc. To this question, Dominique responds without hesitation: “Edouard Philippe is not right-wing, and never has been, he is a former Juppeist who has never defended a single right-wing value.”
As for the position to be had vis-à-vis the New Popular Front, no room is left for ambiguity, as La France Insoumise acts as the ultimate foil. Everyone sees in the “extreme left” a “hereditary enemy”, an “anti-France party”, with which no compromise is possible. To the question of what they would vote for in the event of a second round of NFP against RN, all our interlocutors answered, without batting an eyelid, that they would slip a National Rally ballot into the ballot box.
“The union of the rights”, an idea that is not new
If the French right has been going through a small revolution in recent days, it is undoubtedly because “the union of the rights” is a process that has been maturing for decades. It is a “work of patience”, to use the words of Alexis de Tocqueville, author of The Ancien Régime and the Revolution. The idea of a “fusion” of all the rights already existed during the time of Jean-Marie Le Pen, even if it was marginal at the time. Alexandre Pesey’s IFP, the true spearhead of the “union of the rights”, dates back to 2004, for example.
But if the boundaries between the different rights are increasingly blurred, it is also because the 2010s were those of the right’s cultural counter-offensive. In We are not in bed, Eric Zemmour seduced with an anti-politically correct, assertive and well-crafted speech. It was also during this decade that videos from ultra-right YouTubers proliferated on the Internet. With a provocative tone, acerbic words and nervous editing, these new influencers attacked the “right thinking” of the left as well as its totems: anti-racism, feminism, etc. On the JVC forums (jeuxvideo.com, a website where many young people were very active in the 2010s), thousands of young people shared videos of Valek or Raptor Dissident (youtubers classified on the far right) , and were jubilant to see people finally daring to make these transgressions, in a media space that they considered sanitized and too long dominated by the left.
On a cultural and ideological level, LR, RN or Reconquest activists were thus immersed in a common universe of representations. “Jordan’s activists [Bardella]from Zemmour, from LR, they all know each other, they have drinks together, have dinners, some are friends…”, welcomes Alexandre Pesey. What Marc confirms: “The union of the rights existed well before the crisis caused by Ciotti… the LR, RN or Reconquest activists all have the same references!”
Then came 2017, the beginning of the tripartition of political life (formation of three large political blocs, on the left around LFI, in the center with En Marche, and on the right around the RN) and the long fall of the Republican right to the benefit of the National Rally. “The LR never recovered from the defeat of François Fillon, we went from 20% in 2017 to 4% with Pécresse in 2022… everything is said!”, says Dominique, resigned. This recomposition of the political spectrum to the detriment of LR, Thierry*, a former UMP activist who took up his card during the European elections, observed it during his dealings on the markets: “I was very surprised to see former UMP fellow travelers supporting Renaissance or Horizons. But above all, what struck me was to see that the LR activists were very close to the Reconquest activists! even had an agreement not to fight too much, not to cover each other’s posters.”
For those who remain attached to the traditional right, like the senator and president of the Republicans of Morbihan Muriel Jourda, there remains little but hope: “We will be patient… I believe that the left-right divide is not dead. If we put an end to this absurdity that is the tripartite extreme left, center, extreme right, then I do not despair that we will get back together.”
* First names have been changed.
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