Benjamin Morel is a lecturer in public law at the University of Paris II Panthéon-Assas.
The first theme addressed by Éric Zemmour in Cannes was not purchasing power.
It was not even security or immigration, which primarily concerned his electorate.
No, what seems to have been most dear to the Reconquest candidate is the union of the rights.
He is not, after all, the only politician to speak of union.
The left believes so much in its own that it produces a new candidate per month claiming it.
The idea is simple.
The right is a big family broken by the shenanigans of François Mitterrand, the real Tullius Détritus of French political life.
So we have to reconcile.
If you add the scores of Valérie Pécresse (15.5%), Marine Le Pen (15.5%), Éric Zemmour (13%) and Nicolas Dupont-Aignan (2%), in the latest IPSOS barometer for the World, that's 46%!
Imagine if, from the first round, these voters united!
The scheme also works on the left, even if the goal is more to reach the second round than to try to win the first.
This is even what motivates the popular primary.
We put in the magic hat of the union the scores of Jean-Luc Mélenchon, Yannick Jadot, Anne Hidalgo, Christiane Taubira and perhaps soon François Hollande, and goodbye first place for Emmanuel Macron!
It is that the union of the left like the union of the right is not a matter of reason, it is a matter of belief.
It is a beautiful story that activists and sometimes political commentators like to tell each other.
Benjamin Morel
It is true that we do not have a survey for the right, but for the left it exists.
An IFOP survey for October 2020 Challenge on a single application on the left gives Jean-Luc Mélenchon 15%, 13% to Yannick Jadot or Anne Hidalgo.
Far from the promised addition… Apart from the fact that this survey shows that it doesn't work like that… what is interesting is that it is totally ignored by the half-dozen union candidates and their militants.
It's a kind of political denial.
It is that the union of the left like the union of the right is not a matter of reason, it is a matter of belief.
It is a beautiful story that activists and sometimes political commentators like to tell each other.
Read alsoIn Cannes, Éric Zemmour calls on LR and RN to prefer “their country to their parties”
The following lines therefore have little chance of convincing those who see the union of the rights as the winning strategy for this political camp.
However.
Let us first note that, according to a survey by the Foundation for Political Innovation for
Le Figaro
in return 43% of Macronist voters could vote Pécresse as a second choice.
There is therefore a centrist pole today made up of the LR and LREM electorate and a right-wing pole which, under the leadership of Marine Le Pen, can bite on the left.
Historically, the union of rights is not obvious either.
Until the end of the 19th century, there was an extreme left Bonapartism.
Moreover, it is not certain that Napoleon, imprisoned for his close ties with Augustin Robespierre, brother of Maximilien, is really a model of the right… any more than his nephew.
Gaullism also includes a left part.
If the arrival of Pompidou on a conservative software and the common program of the left solidified in the Seventies a play of stable alliance between political families, it is not exempt from contradiction.
The Maastricht and then TCE fracture is a good example of this.
How to govern together between a sovereignist and patriotic right and another, federalist, thinking that France, outdated,
Only 21% of LREM voters were in favor of this proposal, compared to 60% of LR voters.
This in no way prevents the porosity between the Macron vote and Pécresse already mentioned.
If immigration is thus indeed an element making it possible to define the right-wing electorate, that only very partially directs its vote.
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Both the union of the rights and the union of the left speak to highly politicized electorates who do not vote so much on a political offer as on the basis of a political identity.
However, the militants and elected officials are precisely of this species.
If this gives them faith and loyalty to their party, and that is fortunate, it also cuts them off from part of the electoral realities.
To speak of a union of the rights or of a union of the left is a matter for militants glancing at their navels.
After all why not ?
It is this public which attends a meeting and which it is necessary to galvanize.
The problem is that these myths now seem to guide the political strategy of candidates.
However, to say that the union of the rights is made when CSP+ and CSP- are united behind a candidate, is to ignore the fact that they do not vote for
first for a label, but for a political offer.
It is the latter that should be worked on today to unite the nation, the best way to meet the expectations of the presidential election as de Gaulle had imagined it.