Bruno Retailleau, candidate for the presidency of the Republicans, estimated on Sunday October 30 that “the brand” of his party was “dead”. In an interview at Sunday newspaper (article for subscribers)he adds that he wants to decide “by internal referendum” them “main directions” adopted by activists.
“If we just rip the façade of the party, we’re dead. We have to change everything”, argues the president of the LR group in the Senate. He wishes “build a popular and patriotic party capable of bringing together all right-wing voters”.
“For that, it will first have to be returned to its activists. We will first work on ideas, returning the question of the presidential election after the Europeans”, he recommended. He claims not to be “candidate for only one thing, to change everything to the right: party, method, software”.
“Embodying is good, but embodying something is better: the primaries have been excluded from our statutes and I do not intend to put them back there, so it will be up to our activists to choose”, further develops Bruno Retailleau. His opponent Eric Ciotti has already declared that he supports a candidacy of Laurent Wauquiez for the presidential election of 2027.
“The trademark debate is for those who sell tin cans”, reacted another of his rivals, the deputy of Lot, Aurélien Pradié, on Sunday on France Inter. The name of the party is “a cosmetic question”believes the latter. “The popular right, (…) that’s what we have to rebuild”.
Bruno Retailleau, Aurélien Pradié, Eric Ciotti and the mayor of Orléans, Serge Grouard, are also candidates for the presidency of the party. A vote of the militants during a congress at the beginning of December must decide between them.
Interviewed at the “Grand rendez-vous” Europe1-The echoes-CNews, MEP LR François-Xavier Bellamy, support of Bruno Retailleau, estimated that “what matters is to rebuild a political force (…), to recreate a space to give a majority to an electorate which is desperately waiting for an alternation for France, not to get bogged down in corners”.