“The entire post-politics premise of Macronisme has been trashed.”
Like Julius Caesar’s Gaul, France is divided in three parts: a generous Left often tempted by revolution, a Right split between timidity and national-radicalism ,and a centre that historically has been all things to all voters, from rump Christian Democracy to social reformism. All were in many way impacted by Gaullism, the post-WWII cross-class political oddity that in many ways is the closest to original French populism.
Kicked out of power in 1946, Charles de Gaulle built his own party as he had the Résistance in exile: a common purpose was enough. Ever since it returned to power twelve years later, it retained some of its populist roots, increasingly diluted. The last of its iterations is Les Républicains, as it renamed itself under Nicolas Sarkozy. Les Reps haven’t been doing well since Sarko lost after a single term to the Socialist François Hollande in 2012. In the 2022 presidential election, their candidate, the Paris Region president, Valérie Pécresse, won 4.75% of the vote, disastrous news because campaign expenses are only refunded above 5%. This nearly ruined the party, sparking endless acrimony.
The most recent Républicain primaries saw the victory of the Nice MP Eric Ciotti, a sharp-tongue Right-winger in keeping with the Provence-Côte d’Azur mood (it’s the region most RN MPs come from, and where Eric Zemmour got the most presidential votes.) Les Reps’ Euro elections candidate polled 7.25% last Sunday. Ciotti, on his own, made his calls, met with Bardella and Marine; and announced on Tuesday that Les Reps would build alliances with the National Rally, breaching a taboo that had kept the traditional Right rigidly apart from anything run by someone called Le Pen.
All hell broke loose. Most party grandees, past and present, thundered that Ciotti should have consulted them, and a hastily convened political bureau was called to expel him from the party, as contradictory to its fundamental values. “Half the membership approves. This gives me all the legitimacy I need,” declared Ciotti, channelling his inner Bonaparte. The incensed grandees had to meet in a nearby café, because Ciotti, bunkering down at headquarters, had locked the doors. He countered that the politburo meeting hadn’t been called according to statutes, and was, therefore, invalid; he started drafting candidates for 80 constituencies, 20 of which, he told hopeful candidates, were winnable because in their negotiation the Rally had agreed not to run candidates against the Reps ones. “He’s got the membership register, the Twitter account, the logo and the chequebook,” one of the potential candidates told me. “The others are nowhere.”
A Paris court was last night deliberating on the legality of this. And, meanwhile, having vowed they never would, the Républicains grandees have now drawn up lists of constituencies with Macronista incumbents they will not dispute, in a non-aggression pact that benefits the President far more than it helps them.
Le Pen and Bardella are over the moon. The Ciotti bonanza, which helps them in two or three dozen constituencies, also enabled them to kill off Eric Zemmour and his competing mini-party, Reconquête!, whose 5% voters could spoil several contests. There were strongly-felt and immensely personal reasons at play here. Le Pen saw her political inheritance, the Rally, which she had painstakingly reshaped to serve her presidential bid, attacked by an arrogant upstart who’d managed to win over her own niece, Marion Maréchal.
From the moment he founded Reconquête!, Zemmour, a talented journalist, whose books on France’s unique destiny and the dangers of unchecked immigration have sold several million copies, decided he could transmute his viewers and readership into a political destiny. As he threw his hat into the arena in the last presidential contest, it seemed to be working. From the summer of 2021, long Trump-like queues awaited him at every stop of a “book tour” as he signed his doorstoppers and talked politics, with his trademark lopsided smile, sense of irony and demotic friendliness. A young and effective social media team blitzed all channels, a former organiser from Sarkozy’s victorious 2007 campaign was hired, and Zemmour’s poll numbers rocketed — at one stage he was predicted to win 21% of the vote in the first round.
All this was punctured by Putin’s invasion of Ukraine on 24 February 202w. Zemmour who only speaks (elegant) French suddenly looked like a one-issue man in a dangerous and complex world. He made the mistake, asked about welcoming Ukrainian refugees, to answer that they should remain in Ukraine’s neighbouring countries rather than come to France. This sounded mean-spirited and ungenerous. (He has admitted in a recent book that he’d got it wrong, but had tried to remain consistent with his immigration line.) His numbers dropped like a stone, and he finally polled at 7% in the first round, immediately encouraging his voters to cast their ballot for Marine Le Pen in the second round “without haggling”.
Long before he became a politician, Zemmour consistently advocated what Eric Ciotti is now attempting to create, l’Union des Droites, an alliance between all parties on the right. He expected his generous declaration to be welcomed by Marine Le Pen. It wasn’t. She had taken note of every slight, every jest, every disparaging mention when he was polling far ahead of her. “We are going to great-replace Marine!”, he joked, using the expression coined by the writer Renaud Camus, who believes there is a dastardly plot to replace indigenous European populations with new immigrants.
Zemmour was delighted to have snagged Maréchal, who after early political successes left the Front rather than be ordered about by her aunt. Articulate, combative, more intellectual, Maréchal, a fluent English and Italian speaker led the Reconquête list last Sunday, and polled a little above 5%, earning her party five EuroMPs.
By that time, Zemmour was no longer interested in any agreement with the Rally — but Marion, a realist, was. When Zemmour promised to run Reconquête spoiler candidates against RN ones, she opened her own negotiations with Bardella and her delighted aunt.
On Tuesday, Marion announced an alliance in front of the slack-jawed Zemmour during a TV interview — and that she was taking three of her newly-elected Euro MPs as war booty over to the Rally. Zemmour promptly expelled her and her acolytes from Reconquête!, and has since called her a “world champion on treason”. Unelected to any office — he wasn’t standing in the Euro-elections, his partner and adviser Sarah Knafo, a 31-year-old ENA graduate, was; she will be the only Reconquête! MEP in Brussels — Zemmour cuts a lonely figure at Party HQ on rue Jean Goujon less than a mile from the Elysée. He is the first obvious loser of France’s Macron-crafted political earthquake, but he certainly won’t be the last.
Watching over this toxic brew, with his puppets rushing about as in a silent movie sped up to 30 frames per second, impervious to all criticism, is Emmanuel Macron, the Destroyer Of Worlds, convinced that he can pull a personal miracle out of the chaos. He believes the acceleration he has invoked will force everyone to make fatal mistakes. He has no sense of debt to any of the old politicians he dragged into his net, or to the young ones, such as his last PM, Gabriel Attal, built up as “the best of his generation”, now an encumbrance. It has only ever been about himself, anyway. And should he lose this gamble, with a Le Pen or Mélenchon majority on the evening of 7 July, he has already hinted that he will resign, rather than living through a “cohabitation” like his predecessors, François Mitterrand or Jacques Chirac, forced to slog it though with a hostile National Assembly and PM. He has quietly consulted the Constitutional Council: he can’t stand again immediately, but in five years’ time, he’ll only be 51. Tomorrow belongs to him.