France’s former political stalwarts, Les Républicains (LR), will hold their first party congress this weekend to choose who will take over the reins of the mainstream conservative party after it suffered a string of crushing defeats in past presidential elections.
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LR members will determine their next president in the first round of elections this weekend, voting online, which will be followed by a second next weekend (10 December).
“We need to broaden ourselves by addressing people other than the base of LR activists,” Aurélie Assouline, deputy mayor of the 17th arrondissement of Paris and close supporter of Aurélien Pradié, one of the three contenders, told EURACTIV France.
Following a crushing defeat in the April elections that led to candidate Valérie Pécresse asking LR members to reimburse her expensive campaign, the party is finding it hard to return to the times when it was the only force that could defeat the socialists, like when former presidents Nicolas Sarkozy and Jacques Chirac were elected.
On the right side of the political spectrum, the party is now trying to find its space between the rising far-right, led by Marine Le Pen, and President Emmanuel Macron’s centrist party, which is also doing well with right-wingers. Several LR voters also preferred far-right candidate Eric Zemmour during the last presidential election.
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The stakes are high, as they do not want to show that they …
The three candidates
The three candidates who hope to resurrect the party that continues the political legacy of Gaullism include veterans Éric Ciotti and Bruno Retailleau, as well as the younger deputy Aurélien Pradié.
Ciotti and Retailleau largely focused their campaign on immigration and security and muscled their rhetoric, criticising the government for hurting relations with Italy after France docked the Ocean Viking migrant ship in Toulon.
The government’s strongest critic was Ciotti, who called for the ‘automatic’ expulsion of foreigners and an unprecedented decrease in immigration – a view his competitors share.
Pradié, for his part, is also attempting to “widen the subjects of reflection of a party too curled up on immigration and security”, according to an internal party source, referring to health, education, energy, and Europe.
Pradié is not the party favourite but represents “hope”, at a time when “the party line has moved very, very far to the right”, the source explained.
Retailleau, for his part, has regularly railed against what he calls “wokeism” and the “self-righteousness of a political and media class” that is too sensitive to what he calls far-left blackmail.
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Not Le Pen, not Macron
One element that unites all candidates is their refusal to get closer either to Le Pen or Macron.
Ciotti made his opposition clear during the presidential election race, saying he had “never voted for Emmanuel Macron”, including in the second round when the current president faced Le Pen. In the run-up up to the first election round, he even said he would vote for far-right candidate Eric Zemmour without hesitation, if he had to face Macron during the second round.
Once considered marginal on the right, Ciotti’s discourse has come to be acceptable in a party that advocated a cordon sanitaire against the far right.
“Emmanuel Macron’s policy is catastrophic,” said Assouline, who nevertheless conceded that the president “remains a republican” unlike the far right. “An extreme party in power would be a tragedy for France,” she added.
Party members, too, pointed to the “many elected officials [who] threatened to give back their [party] card if Eric Ciotti was elected”.
Toulouse Mayor Jean-Luc Moudenc already made the decision at the start of November, citing an overly right-wing drift, while others, including party heavyweights, joined Macron’s camp during the presidential election in April.
Polls about the new LR president have not been released.
According to many of EURACTIV’s interlocutors in the front line of this campaign, “this election has important and serious stakes” in that it will determine “not only the future of the party but also that of the country”.
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[Edited by Zoran Radosavljevic/Nathalie Weatherald]
Source: euractiv.com
