Former Defender of Rights (2014-2020), Jacques Toubon calls, in an interview with Le Monde, for a “global republican front”, including with La France insoumise, against the National Rally, warning against a “crushing” of counter-powers in the event of the far right coming to power.
“The Republican front has (…) nuances that, in my eyes, are culpable. For me, we must build a global Republican front as quickly as possible, including with LFI,” emphasizes the former minister of Jacques Chirac in an interview published Tuesday, 5 days before the second round of the early legislative elections. “I have been outraged by certain positions taken within this party (LFI, editor’s note), since October 7, 2023 and the terrorist attacks by Hamas. But given the major issue of Sunday, let’s put that aside for the moment, we will come back to it,” he adds. For the time being, “we say ‘no’ and we don’t move anymore. We are against it, without a comma.”
The former MP for the Rally for the Republic (RPR, now Les Républicains) does not mince his words against his party, whose “procrastination” he “neither accepts” nor “understands”. “My political family is disappearing. I mourn it. I deplore a drift of the right, which I represented, towards the extreme right,” he adds. “We have reached this point because they have broken the sanitary cordon.”
Asked about the consequences of an RN victory in the second round of Sunday’s legislative elections, the former Defender of Rights said he was particularly “concerned” about the future of social benefits granted to foreigners. “Generally speaking, I think we will see what is characteristic of parties of this type, the crushing or erasure of countervailing powers. And in particular that of justice,” he emphasizes, also mentioning the existence of a risk for “an independent press.”
