“The friends of Eric Ciotti” allied with the RN, a heterogeneous group where the LR are in the minority

With 62 candidates invested, Eric Ciotti ended up finding something to add to his “national union” list for the legislative elections. Not without difficulty. “He was naked because they refused to give him internal documents,” confides a resigned collaborator after the announcement of an agreement between the president of the Republicans (LR) and the far right. A sign of the haste and disorder in the investitures of the Right, the friends of Eric Ciotti – this is how the candidates declared themselves in the prefecture – no list was communicated either by the deputy of the Alps- Maritimes, nor by the National Rally (RN) in the evening following the submission of applications, Sunday June 16.

And far from having brought with him a part of LR, Eric Ciotti instead had to seek help elsewhere to find candidates, less than half of whom were members of LR. Particularly baroque, the list reconstituted by The world mixes former Zemmourists, relatives of the MEP (Reconquest!) Marion Maréchal, old hands of the UMP, columnists from CNews, parliamentary collaborators, a spokesperson for Donald Trump in France… and a former Macronist MP.

Excluded from his party on Friday, but still head of LR for justice, the deputy for Alpes-Maritimes was to bring around ten outgoing deputies. The wedding basket is light with Mr. Ciotti himself and his maralpine neighbor, the deputy Christelle d’Intorni. The latter was not difficult to convince: according to a source at LR, she had started discussions with the local RN even before the dissolution was announced.

Minor ideological differences

In the middle of this new war of the rights, we laugh at the difficulties of recruiting sergeant Ciotti “who has already made a fool of himself with his new friends, Jordan Bardella and Marine Le Pen”, jokes Daniel Fasquelle, treasurer of LR “historical canal”. When, Monday June 10, the Niçois puts his young team in the confidence of his historic choice, he also offers them “the constituency of our choice”, relates one of the participants. All decline, except his project manager Gaëtan Inard, who plans to move to Haute-Garonne.

The president of the Young Republicans, Guilhem Carayon, will be a candidate in the neighboring department of Tarn, that of his father Bernard, a former member of the violent far-right group Groupe Union Défense (GUD). In one week, the son Carayon converted to “ciottism” and abandoned his champion, Laurent Wauquiez, who had become, according to him, a “feathered hat” like the others. But seeing him defend the union of the rights on all television sets surprises no one. He gets along very well with Pierre-Romain Thionnet and Stanislas Rigault, his counterparts from the RN and Reconquête!, with whom the ideological differences are minor. In March 2023, the three posed together on the front page of the monthly supporter of “the union of the rights”, The Incorrectunder this title: “Young people cut the cord”.

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