France’s bourgeois-conservative opposition elects hardliner Éric Ciotti to lead it

Eric Ciotti

The new leader of the bourgeois conservative Republicans in France could lead the party to the right.

(Photo: REUTERS)

Paris France’s conservative-bourgeois Republicans are moving to the right. Hardliner Éric Ciotti prevailed in the party members’ vote on a new chairman on Sunday. In a runoff, Ciotti won with almost 54 percent against his opponent Bruno Retailleau.

“In unity and clarity, we will restore the right situation,” said the deputy from the southern French department of Alpes-Maritimes after his success. The 57-year-old Ciotti stands for a hard line in migration policy and internal security. He also stylizes himself as a fighter against “political correctness”.

Republicans are in a crisis. With their candidate Valérie Pécresse, they did not even get five percent of the votes in the presidential elections in spring. In the parliamentary elections in June, her faction in the National Assembly shrank from 112 to 63 MPs.

Nevertheless, the party has a key role to play, as President Emmanuel Macron no longer has his own majority in parliament. His center alliance has to solicit support from the opposition when it comes to passing the budget, the upcoming reform of immigration law and the planned pension reform.

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On all of these issues, Republicans are Macron’s most likely partner. The left-wing camp around the populist Indomitable France party relies on frontal opposition, as does Marine Le Pen’s right-wing Rassemblement National.

With Ciotti at the helm, the middle-class conservatives could drift more to the right, which should make working with Macron’s alliance more difficult. Macron’s government spokesman Olivier Véran called on Republicans to rediscover their “ideological compass”. “Because we have to work with the Republican right,” he said.

Ciotti can score with tones critical of migration

A year ago, Ciotti had done surprisingly well in the race for his party’s presidential candidacy with anti-migration tones and criticism of Islam, but ultimately lost to Pécresse. For a significant minority in his party, Ciotti is too far to the right, which could undermine his message of unity. Before the presidential election, he had declared that he would rather vote for TV presenter Éric Zemmour, who had been convicted of anti-Islamic hate speech, than for Macron.

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Ciotti faces the challenge of defining the Republican place between Macron’s center alliance and Le Pen’s Rassemblement National. According to the newspaper “Le Figaro”, he would like to hold a congress to “refound” his party next year.

He formulated the direction on Sunday evening on the TF1 television station as follows: “I want a right that stands for order. A right that stands for freedom. A right that stands for intelligence.”

More: Macron is fighting with Parliament for his crisis budget – and has a decisive joker

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