The “UMP affair,” 20 days after the election, is still at a standstill with a president declared by the Electoral Commission and the Oversight Commission, elected but lacking legitimacy, and a challenger who is clinging on without having the strength to force his rival to accept a new election.
Supporters of both sides have formed two parliamentary groups within the same party, which is an unprecedented situation in parliamentary history.
While we wait for the two parties, or more accurately, the two “gangs,” given that self-interest and ego have overshadowed political values, to find a way out of this ridiculous situation, we must ask the real question of this internal election.
Because if the entire propaganda campaign and attention were focused on the election of the party president, the successor to the ousted former President Nicolas Sarkozy, there was, in reality, a second election that also had significant importance: the election of motions that will influence the party’s political line.
And there, who won? The motion “La Droite forte” triumphed over the other five, collecting nearly 28% of the votes on an identity-focused line that changes the UMP’s platform. Who are at its helm? Two thirty-somethings, Guillaume Peltier and Geoffroy Didier, as ambitious as they are unreserved, who executed exactly what their mentor, the Maurrassian Patrick Buisson, taught them—Buisson, again, the dark soul of Nicolas Sarkozy.
The shift to the right of the UMP results from the strong influence Nicolas Sarkozy continues to exert over the movement. It is evident through the success of the motion “La Droite forte” led by these two young leaders. Constantly referring to the legacy of the former president, which they promise to defend and keep alive, the two elected leaders advocate for winning back the popular electorate by merging the “social question” and the “identity question” with a strong reference to France’s Christian roots, defense of secularism, and mistrust of Islam.
What does the text claim? Three essential things:
Absolute loyalty to Nicolas Sarkozy’s legacy, with a mission to block any right to reevaluate it. For Peltier and Didier, the history of the UMP begins with Nicolas Sarkozy. Despite Jacques Chirac’s efforts to bring together the RPR, UDF, and Liberal Democracy into one party in 2002, he is insignificant. According to their text, it is the “cultural revolution” proposed by Nicolas Sarkozy starting in 2007 that “united” the right and “reconciled them with the people.” The conclusion is self-evident: there’s no need to bother with the old Gaullist, liberal, and centrist cultures that make up the UMP’s foundation. All that is dead since everything begins in 2007.
The conquest by the people. This is the bet of “La Droite forte”: to transform the UMP into a major popular party, recover all those suffering from globalization to defeat the left and outmaneuver the National Front. Thus, the “recovery of the middle classes, popular categories, peri-urban and rural France that suffer from social and identity downgrading and are the great losers of globalization” is designated as a priority. This leads to a very nationalist project with an ode to the homeland, defense of sovereignty, protective vision of Europe, denunciation of assistance, valorization of work, and exaltation of family values.
The fusion of the “social question” and the “identity question.” This was latent as early as 2007 in Nicolas Sarkozy’s campaign, with the Ministry of National Identity. It was exacerbated during the 2012 campaign, with Patrick Buisson as the main instigator. It consists of saying that “the more individuals are affected by globalization, the more they feel a need for belonging and borders” (Figaro, 11/13/2012).
Peltier and Didier fully embrace this thesis. Their motion blends patriotism and reference to France’s Christian roots, defense of secularism, and mistrust of Islam. It plays on fears and openly flirts with the themes of the National Front.
This is the real revolution of this election: the UMP is becoming a right-wing identity party that is slipping away from its founders.
François Fillon and Jean-François Copé thus continue to dispute the victory by fighting, not even realizing that they have (perhaps) already lost.
