“I stand by my beliefs and who I am; it is impossible to be the President of a federation of the leading opposition party in France while being a constant supporter of the Macron government. It is time for clarification, and it will be up to the militant people to decide.”
With this declaration, Eric Ciotti recently announced his candidacy for the election scheduled for the upcoming 13th and 14th of October.
The “grave tone” is only used to give meaning to an act of political maneuvering, creating the conditions for his candidacy for the mayoralty of Nice as a candidate for the Republican Party.
The clarification requested by the Nice member of parliament doesn’t need to take place because everything is already very clear: Christian Estrosi, along with the mayors adhering to the movement “La France audacieuse,” are not in the same line of opposition to the parliamentary majority as Eric Ciotti, for whom … even when it rains, it is the government’s fault! They have openly declared that they prefer to judge on a case-by-case basis.
Moreover, being mayors but not MPs, the “audacious ones” are not even in a position to observe party discipline during votes of confidence or for the approval of laws in the parliamentary framework.
For the rest, in a democratic party, each person has their ideas entirely legitimately. “One-track thinking” applies in other contexts that should not be a model for the former president of the departmental council.
Furthermore, this position has no effective role in the party’s political life. Who can say where its headquarters are, cite a document from its debates, or say what meetings took place over the past twelve months?
So the race for the departmental presidency of the party is only an instrumental step towards the real objective.
But all of this is anything but a surprise: since the election of President Macron and the new majority, Eric Ciotti never misses an opportunity to try to push Christian Estrosi out of the party. The reason is simple: to have free hands to be the “Republican” candidate for the mayoralty of Nice.
As it happens, the mayor of Nice has no intention of leaving the party and gives no pretext for that. His tactic is simple: if there is to be an exclusion, it will be up to the party to do it and justify it.
So if the chosen path, more procedurally compliant, is to place the first pawn of the escalation by becoming departmental president, the second step will be, in due time, to propose the candidacy of the departmental president for the mayoralty of Nice.
And finally, the final act will be the decision of the national nomination committee, which, as a reminder, is chaired—how coincidental—by Eric Ciotti himself.
By then, the undermining work will continue to create the conditions—who knows if they might provoke some missteps by Christian Estrosi—to legitimize the operation because replacing an outgoing mayor (who has victory in hand) to make way for a candidate risking loss in a runoff—after a fratricidal war—against someone who will, in any case, be an (independent) candidate, merely to support someone’s personal ambitions, is perhaps not the best solution for a party.
In any case, it is better to call things by their names and avoid sanctifying them: personal ambition has nothing to do with the political line, just as Eric Ciotti’s “grave tone” declaration has no connection to, for example, the harmony of a “contrapunctus” by Johann Sebastian Bach.
