The French presidential elections of April and May 2017 seemed to mark a moment of rupture in the history of the Fifth Republic. The representatives of Les RĂ©publicains and the Parti Socialiste, the two parties representing the political currents of Centre Right and Centre Left that have formed a majority of the governments since 1958, were both eliminated in the first round. The candidate who received the most votes on 23 April 2017, and who would go on to be elected president, Emmanuel Macron, had only been made a minister in the Hollande government in 2014, and had created his own movement in April 2016. He claimed to be neither of the Right nor of the Left, and promised a new approach to politics, that would look to move beyond the historical dividing lines within the traditional party system. As the outgoing Socialist government had been deeply unpopular, the PS candidate had long been expected to be eliminated in the first round, but it had been widely assumed that this would be to the benefit of the Centre Right, and so the failure of Les RĂ©publicains to be represented in the second round was even more surprising.
The defeat of Les RĂ©publicains has largely been attributed to the Penelopegate scandal. On 27 January 2017, the Canard enchaĂźnĂ© newspaper published allegations that Fillon had used public funds to employ his wife as his parliamentary assistant, for which she had received 680 380 euros according to the Nouvel Obs, when there was little evidence of her having carried out much, if any, work in this role. Fillonâs defence was undermined by the fact that his wife had given an interview to the British newspaper, The Daily Telegraph, in 2007, in which she had explicitly stated that she had never been his assistant. Le Canard enchaĂźnĂ© also claimed that she had been paid to produce articles for the journal La Revue des Deux Mondes, again with scant proof that she had done so. Further allegations followed, regarding Fillonâs employment of his children using public funds when he had been a senator between 2007 and 2012, when they were only students, and his acceptance of designer suits from businessman, Robert Bourgi.
The scandal was certainly a major factor in alienating potential voters. Throughout his political career, Fillon had developed a reputation for integrity, which had been crucial to his success in being chosen as the candidate of Les RĂ©publicains in the Primary of the Right and Centre of 2016. Furthermore, as Piar (2017) has demonstrated, coverage of the revelations, with new allegations emerging on a regular basis, dominated news coverage and distracted attention from Fillonâs political message.
Figures within Les RĂ©publicains emphasised the importance of âPenelopegateâ in explaining Fillonâs defeat. In the aftermath of Macronâs victory, and before the legislative elections of June 2017, it suited politicians on the Centre Right to blame their presidential candidate for the partyâs predicament. Laurent Wauquiez, who would be elected party leader in December 2017, claimed that the defeat of the party in the presidential elections was due to a rejection of Fillon, rather than a lack of support for the Centre Right and its ideas.
However, the ongoing decline in the partyâs fortunes following the May 2017 presidential elections challenges this analysis. Immediately upon taking office, Macron named Edouard Philippe, and Bruno Le Maire, both members of Les RĂ©publicains, as Prime Minister and Minister of the Economy, respectively. In the June legislative elections of that year, Les RĂ©publicains gained 112 seats, 73 fewer than it had won in 2012 under its previous incarnation, the UMP. Following the election, more figures from the Centre Right were named in the Macron government, while a number of Les RĂ©publicains dĂ©putĂ©s, calling themselves Les Constructifs, chose to sit separately from their colleagues in the National Assembly and pledged to support the new administration from the outside. This group would later transform itself into a new party, Agir.
In addition to losing members to Macron and En Marche, Les RĂ©publicains was further undermined by internal disagreements. A significant number of the partyâs supporters were alienated by the election of Laurent Wauquiez, known for favouring a tough approach to immigration, and for being something of a Eurosceptic, as party leader in December 2017. It therefore seems clear that the problems of the PS government had masked the Centre Rightâs own inability to respond to the political realignment that was occurring in France.
This book seeks to understand the divisions that emerged within Les RĂ©publicains during the Hollande presidency, which were crucial to its defeat in the presidential and legislative elections of 2017, and its subsequent disintegration into several separate entities. It examines the evolution of votersâ attitudes towards political parties, leaders and institutions, how this undermined the long-standing party system, and continued and reinforced a political realignment. It examines how such change provoked quarrels within the Centre Right, which would fatally weaken its political power.
The difficulties faced by the Centre Right in France during the Hollande presidency are of particular interest, as they reflect a wider development in the Western world, where voters would appear to have become disillusioned with traditional politics and representative institutions. In Britain in 2016, the Leave campaign won the referendum on membership of the European Union, despite the leaders of all major political parties supporting a Remain voteâmarking an abandonment of traditional party loyalties that the 2019 General Election would show even more clearly. Populist movements were gaining strength in Italy, Germany, Spain and elsewhere in Europe. Party systems that had been based on the alternation in power of the Centre Left and Centre Right were coming under strain.
Not only are voters more distrustful of traditional parties than in the past, but they also adopt a more personalised approach to political activity. As Perrineau (2012) has argued, whereas previously many voters had strongly identified with a particular class, a factor which influenced their voting habits, this is less likely to be the case nowadays. As a result, the Left/Right divide that had been underpinned by class differences has been undermined, and it could be claimed that traditional ideologies that are related to this split have a weaker appeal for much of the electorate. As some such as Brochet (2017) have noted, voters no longer adopt a single coherent worldview, but rather pick and choose (often contradictory) policies from across the political spectrum, which makes them less likely to support the parties of government with which they previously identified, and more likely to be open to new, and often more radical, movements.
While much attention has been paid to the problems of the Centre Left in this context, there has been less focus on the issues facing the Centre Right. Parties of the mainstream Right in many Western countries faced significant problems during the period between 2012 and 2017, including the Conservative Party, which saw splits emerge following the Brexit referendum, the German Christian Democrats who were challenged by Alternative fĂŒr Deutschland, and the mainstream of the Republican Party, who were not able to prevent the maverick Donald Trump from securing the partyâs nomination as its candidate for the 2016 presidential elections. In France, the Centre Right was not only split internally, but was challenged by âunconventionalâ parties from the outside, first by the FN, and then by En Marche. The French experience can therefore be seen to reflect a much wider phenomenon.
This book will focus on the difficulties encountered by the Centre Right within the French political system during the Hollande presidency. Under the Fifth Republic, Centre Right movements had produced a majority of the presidents and of the governments in the National Assembly, but by 2017, the party had fallen into disarray, and it was difficult to see how its various currents could come together and win elections. The downfall of Les RĂ©publicains was not simply a political accident but was part of a more general trend in the evolution of the French party system.
During the Fifth Republic the Right had often been split between various parties but by the early 2000s many believed that it was necessary to bring together its disparate elements into a single movementâthe UMPâin order to win elections. Unity would be maintained through allegiance to a single leader, the then president, Jacques Chirac, and by the common aim of obtaining and retaining power, rather than by agreement over a particular programme. The UMP strategy was initially successful, and, in 2007, survived the transition from Chirac to Sarkozy, but the latterâs defeat in 2012 heralded a new stage in the partyâs history, for two reasons.
Firstly, the years 2012â2017 were the first during which the UMP held neither the presidency nor a majority in the National Assembly, and as a result the party was now faced with a period of at least five years in opposition. Some dĂ©putĂ©s had been uneasy with Sarkozyâs campaign in the 2012 presidential elections, and in particular his hard-line stance on immigration and identity. Without the necessity to present a united front, as when in government, debates over strategy would become a source of contention, as the party tried to define a programme for the 2017 elections, and would reveal the significantly different positions of its members that would threaten the very existence of the movement.
Secondly, following Sarkozyâs resignation, the UMP found itself without a leader, and with no obvious candidate to replace him. The question of who should succeed the former president would remain unresolved throughout the Hollande presidency. Centre Right parties had often united around a leader capable of gaining power, as was seen under de Gaulle, Chirac and Sarkozy. Without a single, accepted figure at its head, one of the key features that had ensured the cohesion and stability of the Centre Right, and had preserved unity and harmony, was no longer present.
It was often thought that the problem of unifying the Centre Right could be solved if the appropriate leadership candidate could be identified, but finding a solution to this issue was made more complicated by the realignment of the party system that had been underway for some time. Since the decision of François Mitterrand, the first Socialist president of the Fifth Republic, to move away from the dramatic expansion of the public sector that had been promised in his manifesto, towards a programme that gave a greater role to private enterprise, many voters have believed the Left/Right bipolar divide has been losing its relevance (Hayward 1994; Perrineau 2012; Sainte-Marie 2015; Behrent 2017). The similar policies enacted by governments of the Centre Left and Centre Right caused an increasing number of voters to feel disenfranchised, and to either transfer their support to the Far Left or Far Right, or to abstain. This trend accelerated during the Hollande presidency. The need to react to the growth of more extreme movements provoked debates and splits within both the Centre Left and Centre Right. Whoever replaced Sarkozy would need to have not only a programme acceptable to their party, but also one that would be capable of winning support from outside the movement. Les Républicains looked to resolve debate over leadership by holding a primary to choose their representative for the 2017 presidential elections. Both Les Républicains and the PS felt that they had to organise primaries in an attempt to broaden their support beyond their party membership. Previously, the candidates of the two established parties of government had been almost certain to be presen...