Les Républicains in France is in turmoil over the “betrayal” of the election

France’s already weakened center-right party is in turmoil with one of its leaders reaching an agreement with President Emmanuel Macron’s party for next month’s regional elections, stressing the current ones dominance of national politics Macron and Marine Le Pen, far-right leaders.

Renaud Muselier, elected president of Les Républicains (LR) in the Provence-Alpes-Côte d’Azur region, was stripped of his party ticket after announcing an election pact with Macron’s La République en Marche party. Victory for Le Pen’s Rassemblement National.

In the treaty Macron’s LREM party withdrew its challenge to the region and backed Muselier as a candidate, while LR leaders were angry with what some called treason or “property” and said it would be the opposite result in the struggle to keep the far right. from power.

“Terrible sorrow about this stab in the back” he said Eric Ciotti, an LR MP, added that he knew “they were preparing their dirty soup in Elisha’s kitchen”.

The head of Christian Jacob LR immediately announced that the current Muselier would not be the LR candidate. “Fear of losing on the one hand and cynicism on the other have never created a political program,” he said in a statement.

Unlike Macron’s centrist party, which only five years ago created a successful presidential candidate in 2017, the Gaullist LR has a long pedigree and is strong at the local and regional levels of French politics, and therefore also in the Senate.

But at the national level, the party has been fighting since Macron won the presidential and legislative elections. In the 2019 European elections, LR received less than 8.5% of the vote in France, even behind the Greens.

Along with the dizzying decline of the traditional left-wing socialists and communists, which has left Macron and Le Pen as the nation’s top players, recent polls show there will be two candidates to run. -in the next year in the presidential vote. Both are trying to appeal to right-wing voters, emphasizing their dedication to the law and order and their determination to take action against Islamists.

Thierry Mariani, an LR deserter, now Le Pen’s RN candidate in the Southeast for the late June regional elections, wasted no time in pledging to mock his old party. “Gradually the party is losing ground,” he told BFMTV.

Prime Minister Jean Castex announced over the weekend that Muselier’s controversial election pact with Macron’s party is unusual because it is ahead of the first round of elections. Usually, politicians take such steps after the initial vote, as the left and right often take steps to exclude Le Front and the far right in what is called the “Republican front”.

“Macron wants to prove a year before the presidential election that an alliance between him and the right is inevitable,” the right-wing newspaper Le Figaro said in a front-page editorial on Monday.

“It simply came to our notice then. On the evening of June 27th [when regional election results are announced] if it loses its pioneering candidate, the LR-LREM alliance, presented as a wall against the RN, seems to go a step further. “