“The party is walking today on a narrow ridge line, tossed about by the news”

2023-07-11 08:00:12

The partisan crisis that has afflicted Les Républicains (LR) since 2017 seems to have no end. In a five-year term, they have ceased to represent a major pole of French political life to become an electoral redoubt, wedged between the center and the extreme right. The party, led by Eric Ciotti, seems incapable of stopping the tripartition of the partisan system, of which the decline of his camp is the logical consequence. Today it walks on a narrow strategic and ideological crest line, tossed about by current events.

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Refusing the alliance with the Borne government, he nevertheless voted for more than half of his texts. Maintaining a sanitary cordon with the National Rally (RN), he nevertheless largely contributed to disseminating his themes and his ideas, resuming, for example, his security and migratory reading grid of the events following the death of Nahel M., the June 27, in Nanterre. Finally, he recently tore himself about the pension reform, which had always been a consensus until then.

However, Eric Ciotti has displayed, since the end of this sequence, the firm intention of “rebuild” his party: appointment of an alternative “counter-government”, creation of digital media A certain idea and a think tank, then the launch of the States General of the Right, on June 17 at the Cirque d’hiver. While the party president had campaigned on the issue of incarnation – openly supporting Laurent Wauquiez for the next presidential election – with the slogan “Freedom, authority, identity”he ended up rallying to the need to renovate first and foremost the ideological platform of the right through round tables, a participatory digital platform and consultation of experts and intellectuals.

Explaining Electoral Decline

Yet the narratives offered to explain the right’s electoral decline are far from new. The supposed lack of radicalism on the right, for example, had already been mentioned by Jean-François Copé ten years earlier. To defuse these criticisms against the “lukewarm” right, the virulence of the terms used in connection with the rioters (“rabble”, « ensavagés », “foreign enclaves”) increased. It was already, during the States General, above all a question of security, immigration and “wokisme”, with the idea that the rebound of the right was within reach since the events and the majority orientation of the French validated the party findings. What to make incredulous as to the historically low score of Valérie Pécresse during the first round of the presidential election, April 10, 2022.

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