16/02/2015
The UMP has suffered a significant electoral setback these last two weekends, especially Nicolas Sarkozy, with new polls which anticipate no signs of improvement for him in future ballots. Last November, Pierre Moscovici joined the new European Commission, which led to the announcement of by-elections in the 4th constituency of the Doubs département (Franche-Comté) on February 1st and 8th, the first held in France since the Islamist attacks last January in Paris, and also the first since Sarkozy returned to the presidency of his party. Both circumstances have made this by-election a matter of national relevance.
The first surprise came in the first round, with a turnout of only 39.5% of voters and which witnessed the victory of the candidate of the National Front (FN) with 32.6% of the vote. The candidate of the Union for a Popular Movement was knocked out of the race, as he came out third with 26.5% of the vote.
Sarkozy said then that the UMP would not support any candidate in the second round, thus ignoring the tacit agreement to avoid choosing FN candidates and recovering what the Republican right calls the ‘ni-ni’ strategy. But he did not attempt any public personal explanation of this decision and went on a trip to the Arab Emirates instead, which led the press to seek the opinion of other voices in the UMP. One of them was the presidential pre-candidate, former Prime Minister Alain Juppée, who distanced himself from Sarkozy's position and said that the ‘ni-ni’ strategy was a mistake, that they had to return to the unity of parties against the ideological excesses of the FN, and that choosing a third MP from this party for the National Assembly should be avoided. Juppé thus approached the centre parties of the political spectrum, as UDI or MoDem–essential for any conservative candidate's return to the Élysée Palace in 2017–which had already declared their support for the Socialist candidate.
In this context, Doubs conservative voters split for the second round and thus Sarkozy's strategy clearly failed. Turnout rose nearly ten points, reaching 49%. In the absence of a clear instruction, UMP voters decided to split between the two candidates. The victory was finally for the socialist candidate with 51.43%, but the FN candidate reached 48.57%, an increase of more than 16 points since the first round.
To complete Sarkozy’s bad week, amid this scenario of conservative disorientation, iTélé channel released a survey on Monday 9 February on presidential candidate preference among voters of the UMP. The survey gave 43% of support to Alain Juppé, compared to 13% to Nicolas Sarkozy and 13% to Bruno Lemaire, the loser of last fall's primaries. This way, respondents rewarded the consistency of the former mayor of Bordeaux, as compared to a fickle leader, apparently too worried about getting media attention and distancing himself from the party bases. These do not seem to be the appropriate foundations to establish a broad centre-right spectrum candidacy that can beat Marine Le Pen in some presidential elections.
It is true that some of this confusion comes from the recovery of the voting intentions of the French Socialists following their management of the terrorist attacks, and the new international role that President Hollande is getting as a mediator in the Ukraine crisis, promoting the peace conference in Minsk. Against that activity, the UMP offers the image of a party with too many family quarrels, unable to leave their internal problems to provide a reliable alternative. If the UMP does not change this, it runs the risk of losing its candidate for the second round of the presidential elections of 2017, as happened last Sunday in Doubs.