For several years, Les Républicains, the party of the French governmental Right, has been suffering from a chronic crisis reminiscent of the difficulties experienced by the German CDU and the British Conservative Party: an established party that in the past held the highest positions in government is now struggling to convince after years of dwindling discourse and centrist strategy. The question of the relevance of maintaining this party—heir to the Gaullist tradition—in the French political landscape is worth asking.
The polls are multiplying as the elections on 9 June draw nearer: the Les Républicains list, led by François-Xavier Bellamy, head of the party’s delegation to the European Parliament, is failing to get off the ground and could set a new record by underperforming even compared to the disastrous 2019 elections.
In 2019, then-president of the Les Républicains party Laurent Wauquiez took the risky gamble of putting the young conservative politician from Versailles at the head of his list. On the evening of the elections, he received 8.48% of the vote, the lowest score ever recorded by his party for such an election and well short of the 13% predicted by the opinion polls. Never before had the governmental Right fallen below the 10% mark, forcing Laurent Wauquiez to step down as party president and take responsibility for his controversial choice.
Five years later, Bellamy is once again leading his party’s list for the European elections. Internally, he is still struggling to convince a large part of his camp, who criticise him for being too smooth-faced and too conservative: a Versaillais in the narrow, sociological sense of the term: a Catholic and pro-life, he chose, for example, to support Reconquête’s Eric Zemmour’s candidacy during the 2022 presidential campaign.
Since then, water has flowed under the bridge. Bellamy has gained experience, immersed himself in the Brussels swamp, and earned a reputation for symbolic issues such as denouncing the Islamic stranglehold on European institutions, defending Armenia, and promoting nuclear energy. In his media appearances, he emphasises his track record, his professionalism, and a structured, intelligent discourse that is far removed from the media stunts that he believes his opponents abuse. He takes a hard line against the Rassemblement National, which he accuses of amateurism on European issues. According to Bellamy, the representatives of the national Right party are absent from all the burning issues submitted for consideration by MEPs. But his argument is failing, and the polls currently promise him an even bleaker future than in 2019, with around 7% of the vote, “closer to the fateful 5% mark that gets you elected than the 10% that would save face,” in the words of the Huffington Post.
Despite the undeniable quality of the person who now embodies the French governmental Right at the European level, Bellamy’s candidacy suffers from a problem of overall strategy. His party, Les Républicains, belongs to the parliamentary group of the European People’s Party, whose positions are generally the antithesis of the choices that François-Xavier Bellamy may defend elsewhere. There would be some consistency for them—or at least for him—in joining the ECR group, but he cannot act against the rest of his delegation.
The Les Républicains party has distinguished itself in recent weeks by displaying its hostility to the renewal of Ursula von der Leyen’s mandate at the head of the European Commission. But this position, which is not lacking in courage, runs the risk of being no more than a symbolic protest, as the Les Républicains delegation within the EPP alone does not have the power to overturn the result of the vote—even less so in the future if the French party does not manage to get a significant number of representatives elected.
The future of Les Républicains looks rather bleak, to say the least. It is paying the price for several years of ideological inconsistency, and a form of obsession with respectability that has prevented it from following through on the convictions it is supposed to hold and which stem from traditional Gaullism: defending national interests and the image of a strong France, controlling immigration, and preserving entrepreneurial freedom and family policy. These convictions have been betrayed in favour of a protean centrism, which, if anything, is much better embodied today by Emmanuel Macron’s party. Made up of divergent tendencies that are finding it increasingly difficult to agree on a coherent political message, the party remains obsessed with the idea of not entering into any kind of alliance with the Right, even if, on occasion, rapprochements with the Rassemblement National have been vaguely sketched out.
What scenario does the party see for itself in the near future? If Les Républicains achieves a respectable score, it will very quickly revert to its old demons without the slightest humility, and will not be able to resist taking potshots at its opponents on the right— Jordan Bardella’s Rassemblement National and Éric Zemmour’s and Marion Maréchal’s Reconquête. A collapse of the party would undoubtedly be preferable, as it would inevitably benefit the other two parties mentioned above, which are much better placed to pursue and defend a conservative right-wing policy. Unfortunately, there is little else to wish for a party that no longer sets the pace in political terms and maintains the illusion of a ‘Right’ … that is not a Right.
