Former French Presidential candidate and leader of Reconquête Éric Zemmour has expressed confidence that his party will join the centre-right European Conservatives and Reformists (ECR) group in the European Parliament after next year’s European elections. Zemmour was speaking to the Spanish conservative journal El Debate, saying that Reconquête’s strong relationship with the populist party VOX made ECR membership a lot easier.
Reconquête was founded at the end of 2021, amid Zemmour’s presidential bid where he scored 7.07% of first-round votes. He currently has two MEPs, Gilbert Collard and Nicolas Bay, who both defected from Le Pen’s Rassemblement National (RN). Zemmour highlighted the fact that a strong personal friendship between VOX leader Santiago Abascal and Reconquête’s Marion Maréchal made the alliance far more likely.
While Reconquête has positioned itself to the right of the RN on many issues, their potential partnership with the conservative ECR faction would radically upset the calculus of the next European Parliament as the ECR scouts out the possibility of a governing coalition with the centrist EPP group to make a working majority in the next parliament.
Both Reconquête’s MEPs currently sit as non-aligned members in the European Parliament, and their joining the ECR group would fulfil a longstanding ECR goal of securing a viable French partner, since RN, which has dominated the French Right for years, aligns with the more right-wing Identity and Democracy (ID) group.
Opinion polling shows Renaissance coming a strong second in projections for next year’s European elections, capturing 21% of the vote share. France has 79 MEPs in total with the French populist Right generally doing disproportionately well in European elections.
Both Reconquête and RN have seen growing public support on the back of the backlash to Macron’s controversial pension reforms and stand to gain from the recent race riots that consumed Paris and other French cities last week. A former TV pundit and political journalist, Zemmour has shocked the political mainstream over the past three years with his rapid rise in popularity and denouncement of what he calls the demographic replacement of Europe, declaring that France was on the cusp of civil war.
While previous overtures to the RN to form a grand coalition of the Right have been turned down, Reconquête performed relatively poorly in elections to the French National Assembly last year as Le Pen overcame Macron for the first time in presidential polling. Notably, even with the boost to right-leaning parties, Reconquête still trails behind the liberal-conservative group, The Republicans (LR).
The ECR’s dalliance with Zemmour comes as multiple ECR partners enter government across Europe, including Fratelli in Italy and the Swedish Democrats, whose confidence and supply arrangement with the Swedish government has resulted in a major policy shift in Stockholm’s migration outlook. Later this month, the ECR’s Spanish affiliate VOX could become a junior partner in the formation of the next Spanish government as polling suggests serious advances expected for populist and nationalist parties for next year’s EU elections.
