The four conservative MEPs who were recently thrown out of Eric Zemmour’s Reconquete party aim to build a new political force on the French Right, reportedly—with the intention of staying in the European Conservative and Reformist (ECR) group, which their former party joined earlier this year.
The MEPs informed the ECR leadership of their intention in an internal letter dated June 14th and seen by Brussels Signal. In the document, MEP Nicolas Bay explains what is going on regarding the split in France and reassures ECR that he and his colleagues are not planning to jump ship and join Marine Le Pen’s Identity and Democracy (ID) group.
Bay, as well as three others (Marion Maréchal, Guillaume Peltier, and Laurence Trochu), were thrown out of Reconquete for disagreeing with the party leader, Eric Zemmour, about the strategy for the upcoming French snap elections. Unlike Zemmour, the four MEPs wanted their party to join forces with Marine Le Pen’s much larger National Rally (RN) to have a bigger chance of defeating Macron and the leftist Popular Front.
After expelling them, Zemmour accused Maréchal and the others of treason and of wanting to defect to RN—which, at the European level, would have meant leaving the ECR for ID. According to the letter, however, the opposite is true.
“We remain united in defending our values, the same values which made me request the membership of our ECR group. We will not be joining Marine Le Pen’s Rassemblement National, with whom we can work, but we want to keep our differences,” Bay wrote.
Continuing, he even gave the new party a boring, albeit elegant name:
We want to build a reasonable, demanding, sound French Conservative party, committed to defend national identities and all freedoms, including economic ones, dedicated to the protection of our civilisational and Christian heritage, with no concessions to the Left, which wants to destroy our traditions, or to the European Union, which wants to enslave our nations.
The letter also endorsed the right-wing electoral alliance between RN and the center-right Les Républicains (LR) and took a shot at LR MEP Bellamy François-Xavier for “abandoning” his party leader Eric Ciotti for siding with the conservatives when everyone should have the same goal, “defeating Emmanuel Macron.”
