This is an election that interests no one! This is the observation that comes up repeatedly both at the local bistro and in the national press. As Les Républicains prepares to choose a leader, everything is happening as if the heir to the political family that ruled France under Charles de Gaulle, Georges Pompidou, Jacques Chirac and Nicolas Sarkozy was going to join his historic adversary, the Socialist Party, at the funeral home, the place where the bodies are stored before proceeding to the burial.
However, if the socialist corpse, whose candidate (Anne Hidalgo) did not make 2% in the presidential election, hardly moves, it is not quite the same with the Republicans (LR). Despite the 4.78% of Valérie Pécresse, thanks to its local presence, the party still occupies a place of choice in the National Assembly. Unlike the 25 elected Socialists largely drowned in a left-wing alliance (NUPES) dominated by the radicals of La France insoumise (LFI), the 62 Republicans are the object of an assiduous court both on the part of the government majority and the National Rally (RN), which is today the main force on the right.
After three consecutive defeats in the presidential election, LR is nevertheless playing its political survival, believe most analysts. The choice that will be made on Sunday could depend on the possibility for LR to become a force that counts again or to join its old socialist enemy on the margins of French politics. There should be no second chances.
Ciotti versus Retailleau
Last Sunday, a first round designated as finalist the deputy of the Alpes-Maritimes Éric Ciotti, who came first with 42.73% of the votes, against the senator of the Vendée Bruno Retailleau, who obtained the support of 34.45% of the votes. 91,000 party members. A third candidate, Lot deputy Aurélien Pradié, was eliminated.
If Eric Ciotti’s victory in the second round seemed generally certain, this closer result than expected on Sunday restarted the race. The candidates both assume the repositioning of their party on the right on a conservative line radically opposed to immigration. This is particularly evident for Éric Ciotti, who has long championed security. Qualified as “Charles Pasqua new kind”, in memory of the former Minister of the Interior with a firm grip, the one who had obtained a moral victory by arriving good second in the primary which had designated Valérie Pécresse, claims to be a uninhibited right. During the presidential campaign, he had openly affirmed that between Emmanuel Macron and the nationalist and conservative candidate Éric Zemmour, he would choose the latter. Eric Ciotti is convinced that the members of LR sympathetic to Emmanuel Macron have long since left the party and that they will not return.
His chances are all the greater as he is an elected representative of the powerful Alpes-Maritimes federation, the largest in the country ahead of Paris. He has long been the right arm of the mayor of Nice, Christian Estrosi, now rallied to Emmanuel Macron. Hence his reputation as a man in the shadows. To the left, The world calls him a “gun bearer” while The Obs there goes a “Nice Béria”, named after Stalin’s former political police chief.
This reputation as a representative of the hard right did not, however, prevent him from recently voting (like Marine Le Pen) for the constitutionalization of the right to abortion and from condemning the remarks of deputy RN Grégoire de Fournas. In the middle of the National Assembly, while the deputy Carlos Martens Bilongo (LFI) evoked the reception of the ship Ocean Viking loaded with migrants, de Fournas had shouted “that they return to Africa! “Words which, according to the main interested party, referred to the boat or the migrants. But who, according to LFI, pointed to their deputy, born of African parents.
Interviewed by the weekly Current values on what distinguishes it from the RN, Éric Ciotti has already replied that it was not so much the program as the “ability to govern”. The man sees himself more as a super minister of the Interior than as a president, hence his support for Laurent Wauquiez, president of the Regional Council of Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes, as a presidential candidate for 2027. At least , for the moment.
The break with Sarkozy
Facing him, Senator Bruno Retailleau looks like an esthete lost in politics. To the security right of Éric Ciotti, this enthusiast of classical music, literature and modern art opposes a cultural right. “The right made a double mistake, he declared to the weekly Point. She fell into managerial pragmatism and she left the cultural field […] on the left, who made it a transgression. It ceded to him the hegemony over ideas. »
Advantage for some, disadvantage for others, Bruno Retailleau is not a man of the Republican seraglio. He was born in politics with the sovereignist candidate (a Vendéan like him) of the Movement for France, Philippe de Villiers. He will only join LR in 2012 after having supported the latter’s candidacy for the presidency (1995) and even chaired its historic amusement park, Puy du Fou.
The faithful of Nicolas Sarkozy – supporter of an alliance with Emmanuel Macron – do not cease to reproach him for these origins which are both too nationalist and too conservative for their taste. Critics that Retailleau did not hesitate to return to the former president with whom he says he is “radically in opposition and in disagreement”. To the point of asserting on BFM-TV, last October, that “if Nicolas Sarkozy wishes to leave LR, let him do so”. Without advocating an alliance with the RN, Retailleau believes that “we do not expect the French right to restore I don’t know what cordon sanitaire. We know where it got us. »
This week, the one who calls himself the “candidate of the rupture” received the support of 120 parliamentarians. With a difference of barely 5,000 votes over his opponent, the Vendée senator wants to believe his time has come. Would Retailleau be the candidate likely to participate one day in this alliance of the rights which has just won in Sweden and Italy and which the president of Reconquest Éric Zemmour is calling for? Vice-president of Reconquest, the niece of Marine Le Pen, Marion Maréchal, did not hesitate to be favorable to Bruno Retailleau, believing that there were “things to do together”.
Another difference with Eric Ciotti; Bruno Retailleau has always been opposed to the Lisbon Treaty. “Promising the expulsion of foreign offenders will be useless if France does not also give itself the means to assert its legal sovereignty”, write the 120 parliamentarians in their letter of support to the Vendée senator. Like Marine Le Pen, Retailleau is in favor of a referendum on immigration.
Surrounded by the National Rally, the new Reconquest party and the presidential majority, do the Republicans still have a future? This is the eternal question that hangs over this race for the presidency. Republicans don’t have much time to respond. As Eric Ciotti said: “If we don’t win [en 2027], we will disappear. »