Even during the Cold War, Americans and Soviets communicated via the red telephone. So, Les Républicains (LR) can afford a little diplomacy. At the beginning of July, Jean Leonetti receives Eric Ciotti at the town hall of Antibes. The president of LR has requested an exchange with the elected official, the eternal blue helmet of the right. When things go badly, Leonetti is there! Laurent Wauquiez leaves the head of the party with the fiasco of the European elections in 2019? He becomes interim president. The barons are arguing over a hypothetical primary for the 2022 presidential election? He is responsible for bringing them to an agreement.
Might as well try the impossible with Eric Ciotti, at war with his own people since his alliance with the National Rally in the legislative elections. Jean Leonetti opposed the choice of the Nice native, but maintains healthy relations with him. This is what it takes to get the right out of a historic crisis. Inextricable, too. Each camp is entrenched in its positions. Eric Ciotti is marginalized in his party. He has taken almost no executives on board in his adventure, almost all the leaders are demanding his departure. The man is at the head of a ghost ship. At headquarters, former collaborators of the Alpes-Maritimes MP are on sick leave. An employee exercised his right of withdrawal to not obey his employer’s orders. But the man has the law on his side. Legal attempts to exfiltrate him from the presidency of LR have failed, pending a new judgment in the fall.
Jean Leonetti wants to put an end to this legal war. He is sounding out Eric Ciotti on a way out of the crisis. A departure from the presidency of LR, the end of legal proceedings and the cessation of verbal provocations of all kinds. “You are the one who left the party. Not us”, he tells him in essence. It is urgent that the pressure eases. Jean Leonetti has the impression that a door is opening a crack. It closes quickly. Suspicions of a leak in the press and public attacks extinguish this outline of dialogue. Back to square one. “Dad and mom are getting divorced, but still live in the same house. We don’t know what’s going to happen”, sums up a close friend of Eric Ciotti.
Wauquiez, “small pawn of the Macronist majority”
Here is the right wing stuck in a farce, a mixture of ego wars and strategic divergences. On July 21, Laurent Wauquiez presented his legislative pact, a package of measures that the new leader of the Republican Right (DR) group committed to supporting if the future government submitted them to a vote. At the same time, Eric Ciotti announced the organization of a vote by activists on the party’s major strategic orientations, between “integration of the Republicans into the Macronist camp” and “alliance of the right in independence”. What matters is that this formulation makes little of the autonomist line defended by the LR historical channel. Too bad if its legal validity is open to discussion. A war of attrition is well worth a few shortcuts.
Eric Ciotti has in any case found his angle of attack. The man arrogates to himself the monopoly of a right threatened with dilution in a hated power. He unleashes his blows against his former “friend” Laurent Wauquiez, portrayed as a “little pawn of the Macronist majority” after an agreement reached with the central bloc for the distribution of key positions in the National Assembly. On July 20, the group presidents negotiate the distribution of seats in the hemicycle. Laurent Wauquiez discusses with the head of Horizons & Independents Laurent Marcangeli to find common ground. Eric Ciotti, president of the “A Droite!” group, faces his new enemy. “History is in the making!”, he jokes in front of his counterparts.
In private as in public, the war is total. Eric Ciotti’s attacks are answered by those of the LR executives, satisfied with the failure of the Niçois’ plan in the legislative elections. He imagined himself as Jordan Bardella’s Minister of State? Here he is at the head of a group of sixteen deputies, a minority ally of an opposition party. “New Dupont-Aignan”, “pariah”, “he has lost everything”… The elected officials are spreading sarcasm against their former leader. Irony is mixed with threats. The party treasurer, Daniel Fasquelle, is considering legal action to claim damages for the financial loss suffered by LR during this crisis. “We lost votes in the first round of the legislative elections, we lost deputies. All this affects the State’s allocation”, they judge internally.
The only consensus that is clear is that an armistice is essential. No one has any interest in getting bogged down in this sad saga. An LR executive sums up the equation submitted to Laurent Wauquiez, the new unofficial boss of the right: “He is surrounded by people who tell him to kill him. But Wauquiez wants to be President of the Republic and will need to win back the voters who turned to the RN and for whom the union of the right is beneficial.”
“The impression of meeting leftists”
Eric Ciotti, for his part, advances in this fog. One foot in this party that no longer wants him. The other, in his life after. On July 8, he takes stock of the situation. At the quaestorship, he gathers his troops, barely more than fifteen elected officials. A meager haul. Enough to form a group, but likely to falter at the slightest storm. He reassures himself: at least, only the faithful remain. In the corridors of the National Assembly, from now on, it is a look full of contempt that his comrades who refused the alliance with Marine Le Pen cast on him. Some LR deputies are content with a customary handshake, others tell him the truth. “You don’t do that to political friends,” the deputy for Isère Yannick Neuder, close to Laurent Wauquiez, tells him in essence.
“The atmosphere is hyper-tense,” says a member of parliament from Ciott. “It’s as if we’re no longer part of the same political movement, we feel like we’re meeting leftists because they’re so unpleasant.” So here are these former representatives of the right confronted with the reality of the cordon sanitaire. July 18, in the hemicycle. The deputies are gathered to elect the new president of the Assembly. At the podium, Hanane Mansouri, LR-RN deputy, responsible for monitoring the vote, extends her hand to the elected representatives who have come to place the ballot in the ballot box… and is refused several times by representatives of the left, tasting for the first time this treatment reserved for the extreme right.
Several reactions in the ranks of the Ciottists. Some denounce the “crass hypocrisy” of their former comrades who “play anti-fascists in public while they share 99% of the ideas of the RN in private”. Others are looking ahead and thinking about the options available to them for this term. “With the attitude of the LR, the cordon sanitaire has now been multiplied, comments one MP. We therefore have relatively little room for manoeuvre. We expect to do a simple opposition, but above all, most of us are going to concentrate on the ground, and invest as much as possible in our constituency.”
Abandon the benches of the hemicycle a little and prefer the field, therefore. Because many, among the new elected LR-RN, are aware of it: their group “To the right!”, composed of only 16 elected, does not constitute the pivotal force that Eric Ciotti aspired to create, and finds itself at the mercy of Marine Le Pen’s group.
Dream of independence
For the time being, according to the two parties, relations are at their best between the two group leaders who get along “wonderfully”. On the organizational side, things remain well defined. Each has their own group, their own meetings, their own secretary general. And no attempt at interference has been detected on the part of the RN, including in the choice of collaborators. “It’s certainly not Renaud Labaye (Editor’s note: the secretary general of the RN group and right-hand man of Marine Le Pen) who calls us to tell us what to do”, one elected official wants to convince himself.
To establish his independence, Eric Ciotti also set a red line at the first meeting of his group: they will not vote like the Frontists on the issue of pensions. Allies of Marine Le Pen, yes, but the former LR are not yet ready to dissolve completely into the Le Pen group, and still believe in the possibility of holding their own line. “I preached for a very distinct and sovereign line, says a member of the group. Our DNA is a liberal, conservative and identity-based line, that’s what makes us different.”
2027, justice of the peace of a strategy
To make this decision clear, the Ciottists have also refused to expand their ranks to include three people close to Marion Maréchal, elected under the RN label. Thibaut Monnier, Anne Sicard and Eddy Casterman, “too politically marked”, were refused political asylum within the “A droite!” group, despite Marion Maréchal’s attempts at negotiation, and find themselves on the fringes of the two groups, related to the National Rally. “Ok, three more elected officials would have allowed us to lock down the group, but we would have lost credibility by recruiting these profiles that were too marked. Anne Sicard comes from the Iliade Institute (Editor’s note: a far-right think tank, an offshoot of the New Right movement), Ciotti did not want to give a new pretext to get his ass kicked.”
Better to be alone than in bad company. So out with the puppeteers and in with these LR-RN, new dreams of independence on a “right-wing that takes responsibility” line. On the last weekend of August, Eric Ciotti will gather his troops in his Nice countryside for the political return. This meeting will take place with his family, the RN deputies are not invited to the party. There remains in the ranks a question, still distant, which is already divisive however: the 2027 presidential election. “For me, it is obvious that we will have to line up behind Marine Le Pen”, assures one elected official. Another chokes: “Certainly not, it is an agreement that is only valid for the Assembly, there is no question that this decision will deprive us of a candidate.” There are two and a half years left to resolve the issue, and, in the event of disagreement, the disappointed will always be able to secede.
In less than three years, Eric Ciotti will also observe the relevance of his strategic choice of June 11, announced on the TF1 set. History will make him a pioneer or a solitary adventurer, condemned to disinheritance. The man assures his interlocutors that he is three years ahead. In his eyes, LR no longer has its own political space and risks dying a slow death. “I think I am one step ahead,” he confided to an LR elected official. The next presidential election will act as a judge of peace.
.