The Republicans limit the damage in the first round, but remain on borrowed time

LR and its allies opposed to the National Rally won 10.2% of the vote on Sunday. The right-wing party came in fourth and continues to be divided over the position to adopt against the RN.

After a lightning campaign spoiled by the explosive alliance between their president, Eric Ciotti, and the National Rally (RN), Les Républicains (LR) and the various right-wing bloc managed to garner 10.2% of the votes in the first round of the legislative elections, Sunday June 30, according to almost final results communicated Monday by the Ministry of the Interior.

This score allows them to hope for 41 to 61 seats, according to an Ipsos-Talan estimate for France Télévisions, Radio France, France 24, RFI and LCP, while LR had 61 outgoing deputies. Even if it can still save the furniture at the end of the second round, Sunday July 7, the right-wing party risks finding itself more isolated in the next National Assembly.

“LR maintains its position, as during the European elections [7,25%]and even did slightly better than the polls indicated”notes political scientist Olivier Rouquan. “This is due to the territorial anchoring and the good implantation that this party maintains”explains the associate researcher at the Center for Studies and Research in Administrative and Political Sciences (Cersa).

These assets allowed the right to limit the damage on the evening of the first round, while the alliance formed by Eric Ciotti with the RN caused the party to implode less than twenty days before the election. The executives rejected this agreement and tried in vain to exclude their president. In a panic, they invested the 59 outgoing deputies who refused to follow Eric Ciotti, and some 300 others.

Several outgoing elected officials came out ahead of the RN on Sunday evening, such as the former president of the party and current president of the Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes region, Laurent Wauquiez, in Haute-Loire, or the national secretary of the party, Annie Genevard , who narrowly beats the far-right candidate in Doubs. Or even Aurélien Pradié, who announced his departure from LR on Thursday and finds himself on favorable waivers in the Lot. Dother outgoing deputies are put in difficulty by the RN, like the former president of the group in the Assembly, Olivier Marleix, in Eure-et-Loir, or Julien Dive in Aisne. In an unfavorable vote behind RN candidates, they will need the support of their left-wing rivals and the Macronist camp to hope to save their seat.

“LR will have deputies, but they will not be able to claim to be the main force in a coalition.”

Olivier Rouquan, political scientist

to franceinfo

Here is LR once again reduced to being a supporting force, as at the end of the 2022 legislative elections. But for whom? The party finds itself under pressure, courted on its right by an RN in search of allies to secure an absolute majority and on its left by a presidential majority which is also seeking to limit the damage and calls for a barrier to the extreme right.

The Macronist coalition did not present a candidate against certain LR incumbents, as in Hauts-de-Seine, where a local agreement was reached, and disapproved by the party leadership. It allows the outgoing Philippe Juvin to be re-elected in the first round. As for Eric Ciotti, on Sunday evening he called on the LR candidates to “follow the path” which he opened by allying himself with the RN. In his Alpes-Maritimes constituency, he gathered 41.04% of the vote, while the candidate nominated by Les Républicains, Virgile Vanier-Guérin, capped at 5.78%.

The party remains traumatized by the last two years of the legislature, during which the LR group in the Assembly has continued to fracture, over the vote on pension reform or motions of censure against Elisabeth Borne’s government. Symptomatic of the party’s fragmentation, the divergence of positions regarding the strategy to adopt for the second round burst into the open on Sunday evening.

As in 2022, the interim leadership of the party refused to call for a vote against the RN on July 7. “Where we are not present in the second round, considering that voters are free to choose, we do not give national instructions and let the French express themselves in conscience”, she wrote in a press release. But MEP François-Xavier Bellamy, interim co-director, for his part, considered that “The danger that threatens our country today is the extreme left.” Florence Portelli, vice-president of LR, for her part declared that she “would vote blank”.

“These differences show that national leaders are obliged to take into account local realities, while their local elected officials face the rise of the RN”estimates Olivier Rouquan, who notes that the message sent to voters is that “the republican front, in the sense that Jacques Chirac understood it, no longer exists”. A signal which tends to validate the alliance strategy led by Eric Ciotti, who crossed the dike to rally the far right.