If the party of the ex-Prime Minister is structured around elected officials from the right, like Christian Estrosi or Jean-Pierre Raffarin, he does not hope for the outcome of Sunday, on Sunday, which will decide between Eric Ciotti and Bruno Retailleau for the presidency of LR.
by Matthieu Goar
Like his mentor Alain Juppé, Edouard Philippe hates to precipitate things. Between two carefully weighed interviews, the former Prime Minister takes his time and observes, from the top of his good opinion polls, the possible continuation of political recomposition. More than four years from the next presidential election, he and his supporters look at the Congress of the Les Républicains (LR) party with a certain distance. Without hope on a split of their old training.
“Frankly, I do not be interested in it and that does not fascinate the French who have other concerns at the moment, sums up Alain Chrétien, mayor Horizons de Vesoul and former support of the Minister of the Economy, Bruno le Mayor, in the primary of the right, in 2016. We are not going to make feet and hands to recruit disappointed elected officials. We let people choose in their soul and conscience. And then 90 % of those who had to leave are already parties. “
However, the second round of this Sunday, between the deputy of the Alpes-Maritimes Eric Ciotti and the president of the LR group in the Senate Bruno Retailleau, validates the observation made by the juppeists in 2017. In the spring of that year, While they had left François Fillon’s campaign, at the time of its indictment to, in particular, “embezzlement of public funds”, the supports of Alain Juppé and the Lemaarists had, first of all, criticized the right -handed turn campaign.
Then, at the time of the second round, the attitude of certain Sarkozysts, such as Mr. Ciotti and Laurent Wauquiez, who refused to call to vote for Emmanuel Macron, had accelerated the distance from Edouard Philippe, Gérald Darmanin, or by Bruno Le Maire. At the same time, they negotiated their entry into the government.
“I had taken note from 2017 that it was no longer my political family. Since then, there has been an evolution to the hardest right, analyzes Laurent Marcangeli, deputy for Corse-du-Sud and president of Horizons group in the National Assembly. Afterwards, are we still irreconcilable on the merits? No, we meet on many themes but they make a fixing point on the President of the Republic, with a rejection of Macronism. They are not in the reality principle, it remains a fundamental difference. “
old strong personalities
While part of the macronists hopes that the election of Mr. Ciotti leads to LR departures, horizons are not as optimistic. From the leaks from 2017 to the regional elections of 2021, there have already been many defections. The recruit reservoir is no longer as important. The political context does not really lend itself to it, with a lot of vagueness from the executive on pension reform or on the immigration bill. The political transfer window also appears to be frozen until 2024, when Emmanuel Macron’s ambitions of the successors will wake up.
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