France’s Les Républicains party – the conservative successors to Charles De Gaulle, Jacques Chirac and Nicolas Sarkozy – has picked its candidate for the 2027 presidential election. The choice speaks volumes, writes John Lichfield.
In French politics, everyone is a Gaullist and Gaullism no longer exists.
The proof is the overwhelming election of Bruno Retailleau as the candidate of Les Républicains in the presidential election next year. He will, in theory, run as the lineal successor to Charles de Gaulle, Georges Pompidou, Jacques Chirac and Nicolas Sarkozy.
And yet Retailleau’s own political DNA is quite different to that of the classical Gaullism of the 1960s and 1970s (which was socially conservative, nationalist but interventionist) or the more European versions concocted by Chirac and Sarkozy from the 1990s.
Retailleau comes from a separate right-wing genealogy: anti-European, Islamophobic, overtly Catholic and nostalgic for aspects of pre-Republican, monarchical France. His original political mentor was Philippe de Villiers, who attempted and failed to create a rival nationalist-populist movement to Lepennism in the 1990s.
“He is not really one of us,” a senior figure in Les Républicains (LR) says.
And yet Retailleau was elected leader of the successor movement to Gaullism last year. He scooped 73.8 percent of the vote when LR members were asked last Sunday whether to hold a presidential primary or simply install Retailleau as their candidate for the presidential election next April and May.
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All the same, three other senior LR politicians – Laurent Wauquiez, Xavier Bertrand and David Lisnard – are considering ignoring this vote and running presidential campaigns of their own. Many senior members of the Républicains parliamentary party believe that the only way to defeat the Far Right next year is to invent some sort of mechanism to choose a single candidate for the whole of the Centre-Right and the splintered Macronist centre.
Retailleau commands just 7 to 10 percent of first round voting intentions in the most recent opinion polls – trailing far behind the likely Far Right candidate Jordan Bardella on 32 to 35 percent and the former Macronist prime minister Edouard Phillippe on circa 22 percent.
Senior Républicains figures are torn between going all out to support Retailleau or manoeuvering for a primary or an official poll to anoint a mega candidate of the Right and Centre this Autumn.
Here then is a central paradox of contemporary French politics. Many politicians, from the moderate Left to the Far Right, claim to represent the values of the founder of the Fifth Republic, Charles de Gaulle. The Centre-Right party which is supposed to have inherited the Arc of the Covenant of Gaullism is a weak and divided mess.
Les Républicains and their cheerleaders in the French media (ie Le Figaro) regard themselves still as the moral centre of France. They rarely confront the fact that the party’s decline was caused largely by its own arrogance and abuse of power.
Both of its last presidents, Jacques Chirac and Nicolas Sarkozy, were convicted of corruption after they left office. Both were given jail sentences. The last LR Prime Minister, François Fillon, was also convicted of financial wrongdoing.
The Républicains remain the strongest force in local government. Nationally the once dominant force of the Centre Right has splintered at least three ways. One part has joined President Emmanuel Macron’s party Renaissance and others Edouard Phliippe’s party, Horizons. Some have defected to the Far Right under the former LR leader Eric Ciotti.
What remains of Les Républicains is jaggedly divided between those who hate the Far Right more than Macron and those who hate Macron more than the Far Right.
The party enters next year’s presidential campaign with a leader who is popular with its much reduced grass roots but regarded as an interloper by many of its leading national figures (who also commonly detest each other).
Retailleau is popular with the LR members largely because of his reputation, from a brief spell as interior minister last year, as being tough on immigration and crime. He rarely has anything interesting to say on any of the other issues facing France. The deficit? The economy? The Ukraine war? He is said to be working on a wider manifesto.
Although Retailleau is dismissive of Marine Le Pen and Jordan Bardella, he is very close to the hard-right LR European Parliament leader François-Xavier Bellamy. More moderate voices in the LR suspect that he would be ready to work with a Rassemblement National president – maybe even enter a Far Right-led coalition – after next year’s elections.
Retailleau, although he sometimes sounds more hardline than Le Pen or Bardella, dismisses these accusations. He says that, au contraire, he is the only candidate who can beat Bardella in the two-candidate, second round runoff next May.
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Can Retailleau even reach Round Two? I doubt it. His politics are too close to the Far Right and his personality too rigid to attract many votes from the Centre or Centre Left. Edouard Philippe is better positioned on the right of the centre.
But second place next year may be decided by a few thousand votes separating three or four candidates. Surprises are possible.
What are the chances that Edouard Philippe, Retailleau and others will yet agree to a primary of the Right and Centre this Autumn is after all? There is cross-party campaign under way to impose something of this kind. Opposition – not least from Edouard Philippe and Bruno Retailleau – is strong.
It would also be a bad idea.
A mega-primary would be portrayed as a last-ditch attempt by the establishment or “les elites” to deny a Far Right “victory to the people”. It would be better to let a de facto primary of the public opinion polls allow a strong challenger to Bardella to “emerge naturally”.
Edouard Philippe is best placed at present but the first round is still one year away. Politics hates a certainty. Retailleau will no doubt get a bounce in the polls in the next few days but he will have reinvent himself if he is to be next year’s surprise.
I don’t see how the hard right can provide the main opposition to the Far Right.
