Two days after his political comeback, the contested president of the Republicans considers with Paris-Match having “remained faithful to (his) convictions while others allied themselves with Emmanuel Macron and the left.”
His decision had caused an open crisis within his political family. Two and a half months after announcing, against all odds, an electoral alliance with the National Rally (RN), in view of the legislative elections, Éric Ciotti persists and signs. The “Right-wing” deputy of the Alpes Maritimes may have alienated the vast majority of Republican executives, who had taken legal action to remove him from his position as party president, but he does not “regret nothing”. “Not a second”he insists in an interview given Monday in Paris-Match .
While the agreement reached with Jordan Bardella aimed to accelerate the “union of the right” and bring the leader of the RN to power, the impact of the operation was only very modest on the evening of the second round: the party with the flame and its new partner only won 143 deputies, far behind the central bloc (163) and the left-wing coalition of the New Popular Front (NFP). Regardless of this poor performance, the contested leader of the LR is proud of having remained “faithful to (his) convictions while others have allied themselves with Emmanuel Macron and the left.” And to denounce the massive withdrawals between the two rounds, which would have “leads to institutional chaos” : “32 outgoing LR deputies found themselves without a Macronist candidate facing them. The spectacle given by these early legislative elections is unnatural.”
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A charge that in fact masks a major change of tack. Having, when he was elected head of the Republicans almost two years ago, held an independent line with regard to Macronism and the RN until the next presidential election, Éric Ciotti decided to make a change in view of François-Xavier Bellamy’s score in the European elections (7.2%). Whose election night on June 9th was turned upside down with the surprise announcement of the dissolution. “We were too weak (…) To bounce back, we would have had to make 10%. We could maintain this scenario until 2027, but not cleverly, not for early legislative elections”he recalls.
A “violent storm”
If the president of the “Right” group in the National Assembly dared to cross the Rubicon, it is because he saw his left-wing opponents do the same within the NFP in record time. “I couldn’t not turn to Jordan Bardella and the RN”he says. Recognizing, however, that the agreement with the nationalist party “was necessarily tied in haste”the founder of the“Union of the Right for the Republic” (UDR) judges that the right “could not procrastinate”.
However, this agreement raised an immediate outcry in his camp, and beyond. Certainly, Éric Ciotti affirms that he “knew the answer in advance” negative from his comrades. But he concedes in hindsight that he was surprised by a “storm of this violence”. “Especially since the vast majority of activists are with me and around fifteen MPs were ready to follow meargues the parliamentarian. Some of them, now defeated, tell me they regret it.”
