Associate researcher at Iris, Jean-Yves Camus directs the Observatory of Political Radicalities of the Jean-Jaurès Foundation.
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YOUR COMMUNE - The results of the second round of the presidential election in your area
LE FIGARO. - Shortly after his defeat, Marine Le Pen called for launching "the legislative battle", and Éric Zemmour again pleaded for a union of rights. Is this scenario plausible despite the recurring attacks by Zemmour against the former RN presidential candidate?
Jean-Yves Camus. -
The legislative battle is essential because, for Marine Le Pen, her role as potential leader of the opposition is at stake.
However, the electoral system disadvantages her: in the first-past-the-post two-round ballot, her party only won 8 seats in 2017 when she had won 10.6 million votes in the second round of the presidential election.
Without proportionality, no miracle and this observation will also apply, no doubt, to Reconquête!.
The union of the rights?
The concept runs, in particular in what was called the “right outside the walls”, since 2017 and the initiative of the “Lovers of France”, carried by Nicolas Dupont-Aignan, Jean-Frédéric Poisson (today with Zemmour) and Emmanuelle Menard.
This is an idea that has been around in the history of the "national camp" for a very long time:
in 1935, the National Front was launched, an anti-Popular Front war machine which included both the Maurrassians, the leagues, marginalized people like Darquier de Pellepoix and Louis Marin, president of the Republican Federation, which he obtained from de Gaulle seat at the CNR.
The union of the rights works in reaction to a danger”, much less well in offensive.
In the case that interests us, the electorates are different, the ideological software too, and, except that Les Républicains sink in the legislative elections which could rather be their lifeline, even their right wing has no interest in embarking on this adventure.
It's a question of power relations.
Why would Marine Le Pen, apart from the fact that she always wanted to overcome the right-left divide, go, after winning in percentage and in votes, to be robbed of the spotlight by a competitor who won 7% of the votes?
Jean-Yves Camus
Is the political offer on the right too diverse to allow all shades to rally to a common candidacy?
It is not only too diverse to unite but who carries the leadership?
Why would Marine Le Pen, in addition to the fact that she always wanted to go beyond the right-left divide, go, after having gained in percentage and in votes, to be robbed of the spotlight by a competitor, (Éric Zemmour) who made 7% voices ?
And whose radical identity risks erasing efforts to de-demonize the RN?
Éric Zemmour has achieved a breakthrough which is an event but its impact is played out over the long term, with 2027 in sight.
Its best asset is undoubtedly not to achieve the union of the right, because in fact, these electorates do not add up it will weigh if it leads to its ideas on the identity the voters of the right who no longer find themselves at all in LR
.
The union of the rights (like the union of the lefts) speaks to highly politicized electorates who vote less on a political offer than on the basis of a political identity. In short, the union of the rights, is it not a matter of militants looking at the navel?
I would not have stated it like that but it is indeed unlikely that the concept will arouse enthusiasm at the Hénin-Beaumont market.
And conversely, Marine Le Pen certainly won 73% of Zemmour's votes, but 14% preferred to abstain, so we are far from a unanimous report.
There's a reason why the concept is arguably of primary interest to activists, and that's the understandable frustration at repeating the failure, even then, it's obvious, that Sunday's vote for the incumbent president is n It's not a membership vote, that the country is rather on the right and that identity ideas are progressing.
As I hear in the national environment, "the system defends itself rather well", which is why the
idea that a union is the only solution to end the said system seems obvious.
Except that once again, the votes do not necessarily add up and that the RN vote has a class dimension which makes little audible, in the electorate, the idea of forming a common front with the national conservatives.
By reading “Brumaire”, the last Bonapartist sheet which survived until 1938, I find almost all the tropisms of the current RN.
Jean-Yves Camus
Historically, the union of rights is not obvious either. Until the end of the 19th century, there was an extreme left Bonapartism. Gaullism also includes a part of the left…
Left-wing Bonapartism existed.
By reading “Brumaire”, the last Bonapartist sheet which survived until 1938, I find almost all the tropisms of the current RN.
François Sidos was one of his readers and Roger Palmieri, one of the actors of Bonapartism between the wars, ended up as a European deputy on an FN list.
As for the FN that I mentioned above, needless to say that it exploded on the question of Resistance and Collaboration: Paul Chack was shot, Louis Marin, re-elected.
Pierre Taittinger for his part, returned to politics after a period of sidelining, already made himself the apostle of a union of the rights that the CNIP partially succeeded while the RPF could not, nor did not want, to do so. , the heartbreaks of war being too close.
Left-wing Gaullism?
Alas, the names of Léo Hamon,
Jean Charbonnel, Philippe Dechartre and Yvon Morandat no longer say anything to the neo-Gaullists.
Jacques Chirac knew them.
The right of their own party has done a great job of erasing their legacy and memory.