EDITORIAL. Can LR disappear from the European Parliament?

The objective of François-Xavier Bellamy, head of the Republican list for the European elections, is to cross the 5% barrier. An essential figure to reach in order to survive.

For the European election on June 9, the ambitions of François-Xavier Bellamy, head of the LR list, are very modest, but existential: to simply survive! That is to say, crossing the threshold of 5% of the votes cast, which makes it possible to obtain elected representatives, under penalty of seeing the Republicans disappear from the European Parliament. A failure would be one more stop on the long path of the cross that the right has been taking for several years, an additional electoral catastrophe leading it towards its disappearance.

Voting intention polls place the right at around 7 or 8%, approximately the result obtained by François-Xavier Bellamy in 2019: 8.2% of the vote. LR would be satisfied with it today whereas five years ago, it was a real debacle, the lowest score collected by the right in its entire history. Since then, the right has continued to grow, falling to 4.7% of votes for Valérie Pécresse in the presidential election. In 2019, as in 2022, LR was siphoned off in the home stretch of the campaign by a “useful vote” reflex which worked in favor of the Macronist majority on one side and the Lepéniste party on the other. The right fears being squeezed out by the same duel, especially since this year it also faces competition from Marion Maréchal’s list for the Reconquest movement! which didn’t exist five years ago.

The French right becomes eurosceptic

What clear message can the right convey in this campaign? It’s difficult because his European identity has become blurred. Once pro-European, she has become eurosceptic, particularly on the migration issue. She finds herself trailing the RN’s overbidding. As a result, the pro-European center-right electorate switched to Emmanuel Macron, without LR recovering votes from the far right. Especially on the war in Ukraine, LR supports the executive and approved the bilateral security agreement signed with President Volodymyr Zelensky while the RN does not want to help the Ukrainians so as not to offend its Russian friends. In short, a delicate position, illustrated by the refusal of François Xavier-Bellamy to support the candidacy for a new mandate as president of the commission of Ursula Von der Leyen, invested by the PPE group in which the LR MEPs sit. In Europe too, the French right no longer really knows where it lives.