Gaullists beg electorate for another chance
Polls suggest that France’s mainstream Right may end up crashing out of next April’s election
AT A meeting in the mountains between Lyon and Geneva this week, Xavier Bertrand pleaded with voters to save France’s once-mighty Gaullists.
“If we don’t win this election and are not in the second round, it will be the end of the political family that is heir to General de Gaulle, Jacques Chirac and Nicolas Sarkozy,” the 56-year old conservative told an audience of 250 in the town of Oyonnax in the Ain.
After two successive presidential defeats, polls suggest the country’s mainstream Right may crash out of next April’s race in round one to incumbent Emmanuel Macron and a far-Right candidate – either Marine Le Pen or her more radical rival, the polemist Eric Zemmour, should he run.
Both hogged the media spotlight this week – one over her love of cats, the other in a fiery duel with a philosopher over their Jewish roots and France’s tortured relationship with its wartime past. Mr Zemmour accused BernardHenri Lévy, a philosopher, of being a “traitor” to France and the world’s worst “producers of anti-Semitism” in response to a column accusing him of being an “offence to the Jewish name” by seeking to rehabilitate collaborationist Vichy France.
BHL, as the French philosopher is known, hit back by accusing Mr Zemmour of being a fascist-in-waiting. “What would happen if the candidate won?,” he asked. “What does one do to ‘traitors’ to the nation?”
Manuel Valls, a French prime minister under the presidency of Francois Hollande, waded into the row, tweeting: “According to Zemmour... BHL (Mr Lévy) is a ‘traitor’ and a ‘cosmopolitan’ - a fine example of the rhetoric of the farRight, as has always been the case.”
Mr Bertrand – who opinion surveys suggest is the Right’s best presidential hope – urged the crowd to avoid picking a candidate with no chance of victory. The president of the northern Hautsde-France region is one of six hopefuls vying to run in next April’s presidential race for Les Républicains, or LR, whose candidate for the 2017 elections, François Fillon, crashed out in the first round over a fake job scandal for his British wife.
It was a humiliating exit for the Gaullist Right, which had been in the driving seat in France for most of the post-war period. It would go on to haemorrhage seats in legislative elections where Mr Macron’s LREM party won a landslide majority, taking many Republicans with it.
LR now runs a risk of being bled dry in the upcoming election as the Macron camp and the far-Right continue to sap its moderate and more extreme flanks.
On the one hand, Mr Macron’s popular ex-prime minister Édouard Philippe, who hails from the Right, has just launched his own party, Horizons, to woo more moderate LR voters and thus strengthen the French president’s hand.
Meanwhile, the LR faces losing hardline supporters to Mr Zemmour, whose diatribes against Islam, immigration and Europe appeal to Republicans who have been in search of a charismatic leader since the 2012 exit of Mr Sarkozy.