Suddenly, de Gaulle appears on the giant screen of the Cirque d’Hiver in Paris. Summoning the memory of the great man allows LR to send a message: even if the party looks like a “big corpse upside down”, it is still moving and defending ideas. This was the essential objective of this first day of the “States General of the Right”, this Saturday, June 17, 234 years to the day, after the Third Estate, meeting in States General, was constituted in the National Assembly. “They told us dead, divided. They said we were overwhelmed. Yet here we are! Yet here we are! Alive and gathered”, thundered the party president, Éric Ciotti, welcomed with a lot of special effects, against a rock’n’roll background, by some 2,000 supporters.
Ciotti, who entrusted a relative, the MEP Geoffroy Didier, with the task of steering these states general, wants to draw inspiration from the mythical foundations of the RPR, in 1990, to give an ideological compass to his party, after the psychodrama of pensions . While presenting himself as a simple “militant among militants”, the deputy of the Alpes-Maritimes joined in the wake of those who “brought so much to France, from Georges Pompidou to Nicolas Sarkozy, from Valéry Giscard Estaing to Jacques Chirac. To reconnect with this “great story”, repeated all those who succeeded each other at the podium – the elected representative of Paris Rachida Dati, the President of the Senate Gérard Larcher and the Secretary General of the Republicans Annie Genevard, in particular -, we must lend themselves to introspection.
This first meeting in Paris, before local variations, was also to give the floor to former LR activists who, disappointed by the mandate of Nicolas Sarkozy, turned to Emmanuel Macron or Éric Zemmour. Claudine, from Dordogne, made the room react by declaring that Les Républicains, who “lack of coherence” on the pension reform, were today inaudible on most subjects. “The average citizen hears who on TV? Eric Zemmour! she launched, surprisingly applauded by a small half of the sympathizers gathered at the Cirque d’Hiver. Taking the example of candidate Sarkozy’s broken promises in 2007, Guillaume, an activist from 2007 to 2018 in Hauts-de-Seine, for his part regretted that there was often, at LR, a “lack of concordance between word and deed”.
These debates must continue in the coming days in Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes with one of the absentees noticed from these feasts, Laurent Wauquiez, probable candidate in 2027. But for the hypothesis of this candidacy to resist the idea of an open primary – among those who defend it include the president of the LR group in the Senate, Bruno Retailleau – it is imperative to “strengthen the unity” of the party, warned Gérard Larcher. It means holding a common line, based on “independence” and “responsibility.” The alliance with Emmanuel Macron, whom Nicolas Sarkozy calls for, is therefore, unsurprisingly, not on Larcher’s agenda, offensive and severe with a “majority piecemeal, without method, without vision “.
However, to be independent, you have to give yourself the means to be so. While Bruno Retailleau recently declared to Le Point that, in the event of dissolution, LR would “clearly not be ready to govern”, these states-general must allow the pillars of the party to re-muscle themselves intellectually to finally find their way to the Élysée. At least that’s their bet. Because the initiative makes smile – or cry – historical figures of the movement, who have seen other states general pass. “The mountain will give birth to a mouse. They can’t get it into their heads that we’re no longer in the RPR or the UMP, that we won less than 5% in the presidential election! There is a pathetic side to seeing them doing their circus, skating in the semolina dreaming of times gone by, ”judges one of them. And another to conclude, wearily: “It is not enough to summon History to make it. »
