The death of France’s centre-Right

It is a story worthy of Alexandre Dumas.

Falling from the Elysee palace to a grim Parisian prison, Nicolas Sarkozy could now help usher in one of the biggest political upheavals in modern France, threatening to vanquish his own political movement in the process.

This month, Mr Sarkozy shattered a decades-old taboo by turning his back on a “republican front” of parties that have fought against Marine Le Pen’s National Rally in election after election.

By doing so, the former president is positioning himself as kingmaker and effectively legitimising an alliance with the party he once sought to contain that could sound the death knell for France’s centre-Right.

In a Diary of a Prisoner, penned during his 20 days in prison, where he read Dumas’s The Count of Monte Cristo, the classic tale of a man wrongfully imprisoned who rises to orchestrate his rivals’ downfalls, Mr Sarkozy recounts a phone call with Ms Le Pen.

When asked if he would block her assent to power, he writes: “My answer was unambiguous: No,” adding that to exclude the National Rally from the Republican front would be a “mistake”.

“The reconstruction of the Right can only happen through the broadest possible alliance, without exclusions and without anathema,” he writes.

He later went further by likening Jordan Bardella – Ms Le Pen’s 30-year-old protege who is poised to run for the presidency next spring if her electoral ban is upheld – to Jacques Chirac, the late Gaullist ex-president who fought the Front National, the precursor to the National Rally, all his life.

Mr Sarkozy said Mr Bardella’s discourse “is not very different from ours at the time”, presenting him as the modern heir to Mr Chirac’s conservative, pro-enterprise RPR party.

For a party that once governed France, now reduced to just 49 MPs in its new form as Les Republicains compared with the National Rally’s 123, the shock is existential for the centre-Right.

It mirrors the downfall of the Conservative Party in the UK, where Nigel Farage’s Reform leads the polls, threatening the demise of a generation of broadly centrist politics.

In an interview with The Telegraph this week, Mr Bardella twisted the knife.

Hailing Mr Sarkozy’s remarks as “lucid”, he said Les Republicains “has become a small party that cannot win alone”, and insisted the old cordon sanitaire was dead.

“The republican front is nothing but political scheming between people who agree on nothing except protecting their positions,” he told The Telegraph, adding that they “cannot have as their only project preventing the National Rally from winning”.

New polling suggests Right-leaning French voters agree.

A Toluna Harris Interactive survey for RTL shows two-thirds favour a Les Republicains-National Rally alliance for municipal, legislative and presidential elections; among centre-Right, Right and hard-Right voters, support rises to around 70 per cent.

Six in 10 voters overall say a single Right-wing presidential candidate would be a “good thing”, and 72 per cent of Right-wing voters want that candidate to come from the National Rally. “The dam is collapsing,” says pollster Mr Jean-Daniel Levy.

Alain Duhamel, a veteran political analyst, told The Telegraph the moment was historic. “This is the end of the Gaullist Right, and the end of the Chirac Right, which had always ruled out any rapprochement with the far Right.”

And he believes the shift in the electorate is already irreversible.

“The coming together of the Right and the ‘far Right’ is not yet complete among elected officials, but it is already done among voters. The bulk of the Republican electorate - especially in rural, deeply rooted constituencies - has moved to the National Rally. Their elected officials will eventually follow.”

He added a blunt warning about the 2027 presidential elections: “No mainstream Right-wing candidate can reach the second round. Whether it’s Mr Bruno Retailleau, Mr Michel Barnier, or one or two others, none stands a chance against Bardella. Their voters will simply defect to the National Rally.”

The internal fragmentation of Les Republicains is compounded by the fact that part of the party has already splintered toward Emmanuel Macron’s camp – like Edouard Philippe and Gerald Darmanin – which is affecting their polling as they are viewed as politically compromised.

Inside what remains of Les Republicains, the fallout has turned poisonous.

Mr Retailleau, the party leader, is fighting to preserve a Gaullist line, warning that any pact with the National Rally would “kill what remains of the Republican Right”.

Opposite him stands Laurent Wauquiez, the hard-line head of Les Republicains’s parliamentary group, who has floated a sweeping Right-wing primary stretching from Gerald Darmanin, a Macron-era interior minister, to Sarah Knafo, the vice-president of Eric Zemmour’s far-Right Reconquete movement.

The party is still traumatised by the spectacular defection of former leader Eric Ciotti in 2024, when he unilaterally attempted to drag Les Republicains into a formal pact with the National Rally. His shock announcement triggered a Shakespearean psychodrama in which senior party officials barred him from headquarters and declared him deposed.

After days of legal warfare, the courts ruled against him. Mr Ciotti’s jump to the National Rally weakened Les Republicains numerically but left a deeper wound: a party permanently suspicious of its own leadership.

The breaking point came in December’s social security budget vote.

Mr Retailleau ordered deputies to reject what he called a “Socialist” text suspending pension reform. But Mr Wauquiez refused to be seen voting alongside the Left or the National Rally. Eighteen LR deputies,more than a third of the group, ended up backing the government to save prime minister Sebastien Lecornu.

France Inter’s Patrick Cohen summed it up by asking: “Who can say what LR actually wants to do on the economy?” He described a party “advancing without a chief or a compass”, divided between a Right that now votes with the Left and another that inches towards the far Right.

Meanwhile, the hard Right is surging across every metric. A Harris Interactive survey measuring “electoral potential” places Mr Bardella at 44 per cent (up six) and Ms Le Pen at 43 per cent (up seven). Marion Marechal, Ms Le Pen’s niece, is third at 30 per cent, while the strongest Macronist contenders – Edouard Philippe, Gerald Darmanin and Gabriel Attal - stagnate at around 28 to 30 per cent.

For Mr Bardella, the crisis on the traditional Right is confirmation that history is bending his way.

“There are two currents on the Right,” he told The Telegraph. “One is close to us, ideologically and politically. The other has been working with Mr Emmanuel Macron since 2007.”

Politics, he added, “is a matter of big waves… the wave that is carrying us is deep-rooted in the country, powerful electorally, and I believe it can bring us to power.”

Privately, his entourage is even more bullish. One senior adviser said they were “convinced” the 2027 run-off will be Mr Bardella or Ms Le Pen versus Jean-Luc Melenchon, the far-Left firebrand.

“If it’s Bardella versus Melenchon,” he said, “the unity of the Right is automatic. The LR debate disappears overnight.”

[Source: Daily Telegraph]