04/12/2014
Eduardo Inclán, Maître en Histoire, University of Toulouse II-Le Mirail
On Saturday November 29, the Union for Popular Majority (UMP) elected their new president through an internal procedure. The UMP thus put an end to the provisional trio that had been heading the French political party since the resignation of Jean-François Cope by the alleged fraud in the financing of the election campaign of 2012. But the UMP also sought with this internal campaign to reunite their members around a new political platform that would boost the 'inevitable candidacy' for the presidential elections of 2017, i.e. Nicolas Sarkozy's return to the Élysée Palace before the decline of the French Socialist Party and of the current President, François Hollande, who has collapsed at all levels of public opinion.
In order to do this, a media campaign resembling the American primary elections was organised: three candidates (the clear favourite from the start, Nicolas Sarkozy; the former Minister of Agriculture Bruno Le Maire; and the MP Hervé Mariton), around twenty rallies touring all French regions and an extensive media and social network coverage. The modern touch: the removal of all ballot boxes in party offices replacing them by an Internet voting system open to all party members, a total of 268,000, who were able to vote telematically for 24 hours (from 20 pm Friday to 20 am Saturday) using passwords received by ordinary mail at their home. Although the vote did not get on that peacefully, as doubts before the novelty of the grassroot participation process were joined by an external cyber-attack that drove the leaders to file a lawsuit in court, everything was finally solved and the votes were successfully completed by Saturday night.
The results were not very surprising: the turnout was slightly lower than expected, with 58.1% of the votes cast (155,801 valid votes); former President Sarkozy was clearly ahead, with 64.5% of the vote; second was Bruno Le Maire, with 29.18% and Hervé Mariton who could only collect 6.32%.
The victory seems clear enough, but is everything as it seems at first sight? Not really. Sarkozy already run for the presidency of the UMP in 2004, when he reached almost 85% of the votes of the members. Also, at that time Sarkozy was the popular Domestic Minister who fought against the party apparatus and against the remnants of the old ways of doing politics of Jacques Chirac and the elitist politics of Dominique de Villepin. Now, ten years later, he is the conservative president who lost the elections against a figure without experience or charisma like François Hollande; he led his party to economic ruin and to the courts due to the management problems of his 2012 election campaign; his speeches have become increasingly conservative leading him to collide with the National Front of Marine Le Pen over the conservative voters while forgetting the centre, as Le Maire has correctly stated during this election. The president has advocated the abolition of gay marriage, the revision of the Schengen Treaty and the devolution of powers from the EU to the governments of Nation States, which has set him too close to Le Pen's program for the 2017 elections.
Furthermore, so far Sarkozy has not been neutral in the party's management, as he left it in the hands of his right-hand man, Jean Francois Cope, whom he'll now join in his troubles with justice; although the most serious issue, that of the money to finance the UMP who was received by both of them personally from Liliane Bettencourt, the owner of the L'Oreal empire, has been clarified in court. But their economic mismanagement has not been forgotten yet in the party, which is currently still burdened by debt.
All this means that, today, Sarkozy stands as a leader who raises many doubts about whether he'll manage to unite the party around his political figure by 2017, because if the UMP wants to win the elections it shall have to be more united and mobilised, and seek the candidate who generates a greater consensus and better electoral prospects. And this is where more centrist figures emerge, like Le Maire, or more respected by the French, as Alain Juppé, Mayor of Bordeaux and former Prime Minister. Surveys say that Sarkozy can beat Marine Le Pen in the elections, but the results are very tight and any legal development in their pending issues can make France fall into the hands of the FN, which does not give many guarantees to the UMP. The French republican right, rural and conservative, but open to Europe and to an orderly immigration, now appears fragmented and disoriented over their future, facilitating the rise of Marine Le Pen's pragmatic populism. Against this background, is Sarkozy the best man to lead the UMP to unity and victory? It won't be an easy task, either within or outside his party.