French conservatives balk at party chief’s far-right deal
PARIS (Reuters) — The leader of France’s conservative Republicans called Tuesday for an alliance between his party’s candidates and Marine Le Pen’s farright National Rally (RN) in a snap parliamentary election — a political shift with wide repercussions.
“We say the same things so let’s stop making up imagined opposition,” Republicans (LR) leader Eric Ciotti told TF1 TV.
“This is what the vast majority of our voters want. They tell us ‘reach a deal.’”
Ciotti’s comments signified that a decades-old consensus among mainstream parties to join forces to keep the far-right out of power was blowing up following President Emmanuel Macron’s unexpected decision to call snap elections.
Ciotti’s move also seemed to push the Republicans — the heir to Charles de Gaulle and Jacques Chirac’s parties — to the brink of collapse, with several party lawmakers walking out the door.
“It’s unthinkable for me (and many Republican members of
Parliament) that there could be the slightest agreement, the slightest alliance, even local, or personal, with the RN,” Philippe Gosselin, an LR lawmaker, told Reuters, adding that LR lawmakers would create a new group.
Party veterans said Ciotti was isolated, but he controlled the party and they could struggle to meet the weekend deadline to field candidates outside the party structures.
The anti-immigration, euroskeptic RN is widely expected to emerge as the strongest force, although it may fall short of an absolute majority, according to an opinion poll on Monday. The RN was therefore looking for allies to secure control of parliament and it immediately welcomed Ciotti’s overtures.
LR was already a shadow of its former self, having lost key members to Macron’s centrist party and the far-right. An LR parliamentary source estimated that only about 10 LR lawmakers, out of 61, would accept such a deal.