2023-10-26 13:00:18
Today’s right to the mirror of yesterday’s right. A few days apart, on the same channel, two figures from the Les Républicains (LR) party, Eric Ciotti and Dominique de Villepin, presented radically different visions of the conflict in the Middle East, which has returned to the heart of the news since Hamas’s bloody attack on Israel on October 7. Having just returned from a trip to Tel Aviv which upset him, the president of LR expressed, Wednesday October 25 on France Inter, his unconditional support for the Hebrew State, whatever the price of the retaliates. “There is international humanitarian law, but there is also an international right to combat terrorism”insisted Eric Ciotti.
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When others – like the first secretary of the Socialist Party, Olivier Faure – call for peace and reconnect with the traditional position of France, carried by De Gaulle, Chirac and Mitterrand, the head of the right approved The idea suggested by Emmanuel Macron of an international coalition to fight against Hamas. For Eric Ciotti, this is not a question of “territorial conflict” but of a war of « civilisations » between the West and democracies, on the one hand, Islamism and terrorism, on the other. “Hamas is Daesh [l’organisation Etat islamique]. This is what we suffered at the Bataclan in Nice. They are the same authors, the same ferments”, he insisted, adding that ” they are the same who murdered Dominique Bernard [à Arras, le 13 octobre] ».
Still on France Inter, the deputy for Alpes-Maritimes refused to call for an end to colonization in the West Bank. And spoke in favor of stopping European aid to Gaza, on the grounds that it could be diverted by Hamas. A position judged harshly by Dominique de Villepin, invited two weeks earlier. Jacques Chirac’s former foreign minister reproached his former LR friends between the lines for passing the Palestinian issue aside, in the name of Israel’s inalienable right to ensure its security. “We must neither put the aggressor and the attacked back to back, nor ignore the reality and complexity of these subjects”he noted, arguing that “the right to self-defense is not a right to indiscriminate revenge” and “Hamas is not the Palestinian people”.
” Zero tolerance “
But Dominique de Villepin is now an ultra-minority voice on the right. The line of the UMP, which became LR, evolved over time, breaking more and more with the Chiraco-Villepinist doctrine, inherited from Gaullism, centered on a two-state solution, an autonomous voice for France and a capacity to talk with everyone. “What we called “France’s Arab policy” in the time of Jacques Chirac belongs, for today’s right, to a bygone past”, unabashedly confirms former LR MP Guillaume Larrivé, according to whom Eric Ciotti’s party “does not keep Israel and Palestinian demands at an equal distance.”
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