The European People’s Party (EPP) elected its main leaders internally on Wednesday, June 19th. As the largest parliamentary group, following the June 9th elections, it re-elected Germany’s Manfred Weber as its president. The newly elected vice presidents include French MEP François-Xavier Bellamy, whose promotion in the European Parliament coincides with his party being torn apart nationally in France. Bellamy himself has taken a stance against the unity of the right.
The rise of Bellamy is further evidence of conservatives frittering away the potential of their European election victories earlier this month.
Manfred Weber is a typical representative of the Brussels uniparty. A member of the Christian Social Union (CSU), the Bavarian branch of Germany’s mainstream right-wing party, the Christian Democratic Union (CDU), Weber has headed his party’s delegation since 2014. He has also led the EPP group since 2022. He was re-elected to his post with 95% of the votes by the 188 MEPs in his group in the European Parliament—numerically the largest group.
Alongside Weber, ten vice presidents were elected. One of them is Bellamy, head of the list for the French centre-right party Les Républicains (LR). He was chosen to succeed his compatriot Arnaud Danjean, who did not stand for re-election. Bellamy secured just 7.4% of the French vote in the European elections, well behind the Rassemblement National (RN) (31.3%) and just two points ahead of Reconquête, represented by Marion Maréchal.
Bellamy’s LR party has been in turmoil in France since its member-elected president Éric Ciotti took the courageous step of entering into an electoral alliance with the RN in the run-up to the early national elections, due to be held on June 30th following Emmanuel Macron’s dissolution of the National Assembly. The agreement, reached between Ciotti and Bardella, should enable around 60 LR MPs to stand with the support of the RN in their constituencies.
This is the first time that an embryonic union of the Right has been achieved in France. Ciotti understands his party is struggling to exist—trapped between the centre embodied by Emmanuel Macron’s party and the national Right of Bardella and Le Pen—and is acting on this.
While Ciotti claims to be able to count on the party’s membership base, his choice has been vigorously criticised by the historical figures of his political formation, who are opposed to any form of rapprochement with the RN. An impromptu political bureau was even called to remove Ciotti from his position as president of LR, but the courts suspended his exclusion.
The offensive against Ciotti was led by figures such as Gérard Larcher, president of the Senate, and Valérie Pécresse, former unsuccessful LR candidate for the 2022 presidential election. They have in common the experience of having accompanied the party in its descent into hell for several years, due to the lack of a clearly asserted right-wing position and a refusal to make a clear statement against Macronism.
François-Xavier Bellamy is often presented as a figure of conservatism within the LR party—notably because of his positions on societal issues. He was unexpectedly chosen to condemn Ciotti’s initiative to attempt a unification of the Right and was appointed interim president of the party, alongside MP Annie Genevard, in the dispute that sought to oust Ciotti from his post.
At a later stage—probably in the face of a lack of understanding of his position, dictated by the choices of his party—Bellamy tried to change his position by explaining that in a voting configuration that would force him to choose between the far left and the RN, he would obviously vote for the RN.
At the European level, Ciotti’s decision to form an alliance with the RN, a member of the Identity and Democracy (ID) parliamentary group, has been criticised by the EPP, which has announced that it would consider expelling the LR party from the EPP if it maintained this position. The election of François-Xavier Bellamy as vice-president of the EPP clearly shows that the EPP chose to stand against Ciotti. For the time being, the legal battle over the future of the LR party is not over, and its fate will depend on the final results of the ballot box on July 7th.
