After days of media controversy and growing unease among his party's centre party allies, Nicolas Sarkozy finally moved this week to discipline one of his once-loyal supporters who described France as a country of “white race”. The president of the right-wing Les Républicains (LR) – formerly the UMP – made clear that Nadine Morano, a former government minister and current European Member of Parliament, would be de-selected as a party candidate for December's regional elections. This abrupt announcement on Wednesday was, however, in sharp contrast with the earlier reaction of the party's leaders, who had distanced themselves from Morano's comments while stopping well short of calling on her to step down as a candidate.
Nadine Morano, who once once a Sarkozy loyalist but who recently announced she might stand in the Right's primary election to choose a candidate for the 2017 presidential election, made her comments on Saturday night television talk show 'On n'est pas couché' on September 26th. She told the programme on public broadcaster France 2: “To ensure national cohesion we have to keep a balance in the country, in other words its majority culture. We are a Judeo-Christian country – as General de Gaulle said – of white race that welcomes foreigners. I want France to remain France and I don't want it to become a Muslim country.”
Her comments quickly sparked a political outcry that dominated the domestic political agenda on Sunday and lasted into the week. It only began to subside when, after 72 hours of controversy, the LR president and former head of state Nicolas Sarkozy finally decided on Wednesday that his former loyal supporter had to be de-selected as a candidate for the regional elections. She is currently top of the list of LR candidates for the Meurthe-et-Moselle département (akin to a county) in the new, enlarged Alsace-Champagne-Ardenne-Lorraine region in the north-east of the country.
A press release from Les Républicains stated: “Her latest remarks do not correspond either to the reality of France or to the values defended by Les Républicains. All those who seek to make publicity-grabbing declarations that damage the credibility of Les Républicains should understand that there will be consequences.” The move to remove Morano as a candidate is likely to be made at the next meeting of the LR's national selection committee, the Commission Nationale d’Investiture (CNI), on Wednesday October 7th.
On Thursday, meanwhile, the head of another LR-centrist election list in the Alsace-Champagne-Ardenne-Lorraine region, Jean Rottner from the Haut-Rhin département, revealed that Morano could yet be allowed to stand in the elections if she produces a letter of apology. “Nicolas Sarkozy is still leaving the door open for her,” said Rottner, the mayor of Mulhouse, on RMC radio. “If she makes a written apology we will examine on the CNI if keeping her is compatible with the campaign.” But Morano herself seemed to shut the door firmly on that possibility when she told the same radio station: “I am not apologising for anything.”
In fact Morano, who was junior minister with responsibility for families under President Sarkozy, continued on her theme even from Moscow, where on Thursday she was attending a parliamentary forum on international security. “You see, in Congo they recognise France as a white race country with some blacks, as Congo is a country of black race with some whites,” she said.
Yet last Sunday, September 27th, the day after Morano's initial comments, the mood had been quite different. As the party faithful gathered for the first political rally held by the LR's candidate for the Paris region, Valérie Pécresse, at Nogent-sur-Marne, east of Paris, many senior figures simply shrugged their shoulders. “That's what she does,” said a close ally of Bruno Le Maire, who unsuccessfully competed against Sarkozy to be party president. A party MP told Mediapart: “The problem is that among our activists there are many people who think like her. So we can't really say much.” Moreover, everyone spoke off the record, with no one considering going public on the issue at the time.
Indeed, the fact that the affair became more bitter as the week wore on had little to do with the stance adopted by senior party figures such as Bruno Le Maire or Bordeaux mayor Alain Juppé, who is a candidate for the Right's presidential primary election. Both men were happy simply to distance themselves from Nadine Morano's comments without raising the issue of whether she should be de-selected as an election candidate. For once, it was events at a local level that made the national leadership give way.
On Sunday, while Nicolas Sarkozy, his former prime minister François Fillon and others were putting on a show of unity at Valérie Pécresse's rally, further to the north-east the LR's lead candidate for the whole of the Alsace-Champagne-Ardenne-Lorraine region, Philippe Richert, was finding out about Morano's “white race” comments which were by then dominating the country's TV news channels. “I was in Metz to attend a tennis tournament in the company of many LR, UDI and MoDem [editor's note, both centrist parties] elected representatives,” Richert, a former senator for the UMP, told Mediapart. “It was all decided there. We said we were going to wait a little to see how things turned out, but I made an initial statement anyway, to make clear the position of the head of the list [of candidates].”
That same evening Richert received a phone call from Nadine Morano who told him of her “anger” over the controversy. “She told me she could not accept doubts being raised about her,” said Richert. The two politicians then spoke about their values, about Charles de Gaulle and the “people of France”. Though they clearly did not come to an agreement, Richert nonetheless thought that he had swayed the former minister in her views.
Thus when on the following day, Monday, Morano stood by her comments and released a press statement, Richert responded with a second communiqué of his own. Supported by his friends in the centre parties, Richert was reluctant to put his campaign in jeopardy “for someone who is playing it solo”. He told Mediapart: “I tried to contact [Nadine Morano] four times during Monday. I left her messages saying to her that we had to find a way out of this current climate, that we should make a fresh start. She never called me back.”
Enlargement : Illustration 2
By Tuesday more and more figures in the LR had distanced themselves from Morano's comments though the party HQ in Paris was still not responding on the question of whether she should remain a candidate. However, the president of the centrist Parti Radical and UDI mayor of Nancy in the Meurthe-et-Moselle, Laurent Hénart, told Mediapart that if Nadine Morano did not withdraw her remarks then it would simply not be possible to have a joint LR-centrist lead candidate in that département.
When on that same day Mediapart questioned Christian Estrosi, the head of the LR's national selection committee, the CNI, he avoided the question of Morano's candidacy, simply stating that the “two next CNI's on the agenda are to do with French Guiana and Brittany...” Another member of the CNI, Roger Karoutchi, said that he was “not aware of anything” about de-selecting Morano, but that in any case it seemed to him “a little difficult to remove anything from anyone”. Behind the scenes, meanwhile, Richert remained busy at work.
'My political family is killing me'
Philippe Richert had contacted Nicolas Sarkozy's entourage to “point out that it would be difficult to shoulder Morano's comments” in the context of the campaign that he was currently conducting. “Playing the role of a Front National mark two [editor's note, a reference to the far-right party led by Marine Le Pen] isn't my thing,” said the former member of the centre-right UDF. “I didn't sign up for that. I don't want to hide my values because Nadine Morano has decided to sing her own tune.”
But at party headquarters officials wanted to wait a little longer before making a public pronouncement. On Wednesday morning the MEP was due to give an interview to Europe 1 radio, an occasion seen as her last chance to put things right. “Everyone called her to tell her that she had to apologise,” explained one LR official. Everyone except Nicolas Sarkozy. He left it to his loyal lieutenant Brice Hortefeux to explain that the leader of the opposition did not want to “give oxygen” to the affair.
However, when Nadine Morano said on Wednesday morning that “obviously” she stood by her comments, the former president was backed into a corner. In his office at party HQ Sarkozy told Richert that he understood his position and that a press release announcing that the matter was being referred to the CNI selection committee was about to be issued.
At midday Sarkozy used his closing speech after the LR's workshop on workplace regulations to raise the subject again. Without once naming his former minister Morano, Sarkozy attacked those whose “misconduct” was “more to do with a concern for personal publicity than for deep reflection”. And the party boss warned: “I have to say to all those who are looking to provoke: provoke on your own, but leave us to run and prepare the regional elections.”
Enlargement : Illustration 3
The Morano affair is far from being just a transient news story. It shines a light on the gulf that separates local elected representatives and the LR's national leaders. In the space of three days the dawning reality of the importance of key local electoral alliances - between the LR and the centrist parties – brought into line all those party bosses who until then had sought to explain that the MEP's comments simply concerned her, and her alone.
The moderate wing of the LR, those allied with the centrists, had made their presence felt. Nicolas Sarkozy could not take the risk of putting the unity of the right and the centre at risk, not even in a single region. For if members of the LR have a habit of denigrating centrist parties such as the UDI and MoDem, it seems quite clear that the party cannot do without them.
On October 7th, therefore, the date of the next meeting of the party's selection committee, it seems likely that Nadine Morano will be stripped of her candidacy in the Meurthe-et-Moselle département – barring any last-minute apology. The former MP Valérie Debord, Laurent Hénard's deputy in Nancy, is already in pole position to replace her.
“My political family is killing me,” was the reaction of Morano herself on the website of Le Figaro newspaper. She took the opportunity to point out that she had “supported the Grenoble speech [editor's note, President Nicolas Sarkozy's July 2010 speech stigmatising immigrants and the Roma people] and the speech on the African, who has not fully entered into history [Sarkozy's speech in 2007 in which he said Africa had failed to embrace progress]”. And she told Le Point weekly magazine that “there's not even any point in [Sarkozy] thinking of standing for the presidential election, I will murder him!”
For the time being, however, there is no question of Nadine Morano being forced to leave Les Républicains. “Unless there are fresh declarations she will only leave if she decides to,” says a party official who knows her well. “Everyone is asking if she is going to join the [Front National (FN)]. I don't think so personally.” Indeed, on Thursday both the FN's president Marine Le Pen and its vice-president Florian Philippot seemed to rule out the possibility.
However, though Morano herself has not publicly broached the subject, she did re-tweet a message (see below in French) from Karim Ouchikh, the president of the small Sovereignty, Independence and Liberties (SIEL) party founded by Paul-Marie Coûteaux, who is close to the FN, and which is part of the far-right and right-wing Rassemblement Bleu Marine (RBM) movement, which also includes the FN. It read: “@nadine_morano 'de-selected' by LR in the regional elections! The soft right more than ever a prisoner of the moral left's intellectual straitjacket.”
As for the European Parliament, where Morano is an MEP, “no one has heard about the affair”, the head of the French delegation at the right-wing European People's Party group, Alain Lamassoure, told Mediapart. The LR MEP said that Nadine Morano's “level of diligence” had “not yet permitted her to be known to many colleagues...” He added: “This is all quite difficult. But I don't think the controversy will reach as far as Brussels. To be honest, the comments she made are untranslatable, our European colleagues wouldn't understand.”
Yet while it may simply be a French affair, the row caused by Nadine Morano's television appearance will bring a smile to the face of Nicolas Sarkozy's opponents. “It's a ticking bomb and his fault: his creature is now out of his control,” a party official told Le Monde on Wednesday, referring to how the former president had himself made France's national identity a major issue. In fact, in punishing one of the stalwarts of the Sarkozy approach, the ex-head of state runs the risk of annoying his core activists, many of whom would not disagree with Morano's words. The famous ultra-right “hard core” on whom he is counting to win the Right's 2016 primary election can itself rebel.
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- The French version of this article can be found here.
English version by Michael Streeter