It may not yet have chosen a candidate for next year’s presidential elections, but the conservative Les Républicains party (LR) does now have a policy programme with which to battle for a return to power after what is now nine years in opposition.
The two-round presidential contest will be held next April, when Emmanuel Macron is widely expected to seek re-election, and will be followed by parliamentary elections in June, all to the backdrop of a diminished and divided Left and mainstream, conservative Right.
The latter is essentially represented by the LR, sandwiched between centre-right Macron, whose government includes LR renegades (and other from the Socialist Party), and the far-right Rassemblement National party (the former Front National), whose leader Marine Le Pen reached the second and final round play-off in the 2017 presidential poll, won by Macron.
The LR programme is close to that presented by its candidate, François Fillon, in the 2017 elections, although it stops short of including the most controversial of Fillon’s manifesto, notably the axing of 500,000 public sector jobs.
It was presented for the first time at last weekend’s conference of the youth wing of the party, the Jeunes Républicains, at the Paris Parc Floral, just south of the capital, when a few hundred copies of the 38-page document were handed out. For the party leadership, still incapable of naming its candidate, or even confirming – or dismissing – the holding of primaries, it served as a welcome lightening conductor.
Those who came to the venue hoping to discover more about the future choice of the party’s candidate would leave disappointed, the organisers having made sure that the controversial issues were not raised. These included the question of Xavier Bertrand, a former labour minister under the presidency of Nicolas Sarkozy, and now head of the north-east Hauts-de-France regional council. Bertrand, once a high-profile party stalwart, left the LR in 2017 to lead a career as an independent conservative, but is still regarded as close to its electorate. He has already thrown his hat into the election ring, but has refused to take part in the LR primaries – if they are held.
The primaries are another controversial subject not discussed at the weekend conference. There has not yet been a decision to hold primaries, called for by some in the party and also among the multiplying numbers of declared candidates who now include the EU’s Brexit negotiator Michel Barnier, 70, Paris regional council chief Valérie Pécresse,54, who, like Bertrand, resigned from the party but remains closely allied to it, and Éric Ciotti, 55, a Member of Parliament for a constituency in Nice. Like the other thorny issues, their candidatures were also not discussed at the conference.
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Instead, ideas were made the priority. “For the presidential [elections], there has to be an incarnation, you've been told that fifty times,” said the party’s president (chairman) Christian Jacob, addressing the conference attendees. “But we first must incarnate something, and something solid. And we can see that, while debating the [matters of] substance, there are far fewer differences among us. When we debate, we come together, because we are capable of finding ourselves. Today, who among us doesn’t find themselves in the project?” Unsurprisingly, no-one in the audience spoke out.
But the atmosphere of the gathering was more about building confidence and motivation among the young militants, with lots of waving of miniature French tricolour flags and cries of “We’re going to win”, “We’re going to win”, rather than any wallowing in the detail of the programme, and which will in fact not thoroughly bind the candidate the party eventually appoints. “There’s everything and anything in there,” commented one local representative of the Jeunes Républicains. “The party mixed together the propositions of the ones and the others so that everyone was satisfied.”
For Christian Jacob, “We carried out a truly thorough job, it wasn’t four technocrats who drew it up on the corner of a table”. He was referring to the forums, the hearings, the meetings and other consultative procedures set up since he was made party president in October 2019. The LR claims the programme, in all, represents 18 months of consultation work and hundreds of hours to put onto page.
Among the 30 objectives set out in the programme (which include “Halting the explosion of violence” and “Finding a balance between ethics and technical progress”), are a few of the French Right’s pet themes, like pushing the age for retirement pension rights to 65, and putting an end to the system of special pension rights, including an earlier retirement age, enjoyed in some branches of the public sector. On the economic front, the LR programme pledges “to progressively reduce the compulsory levies [taxes and social contributions] weighing on companies and upon households”, and to make “a serious effort at controlling public spending”. All quite traditional refrains.
The LR programme recycles measures which were already championed in his day by the party’s former chairman, Nicolas Sarkozy, president between 2007-2012. These include reducing inheritance tax; ending the legal 35-hour week and replacing it with a working week negotiated sector by sector, business by business; giving greater autonomy to the heads of schools; building greater prison capacity; hardening sentences for minors and opposition to any further widening of the number of European Union member states.
The LR also strived to mark its difference with Emmanuel Macron – who it accuses of “fracturing France” and dividing the French – with its adoption of a role as defender of the middle classes – who the party describes as “the major losers under the government’s tax policies” –and also of the rural population, and local authorities. The programme document denounces an “explosion in delinquency”, “judicial laxism”, “uncontrolled” immigration, and a “catastrophic” situation for public finances.
To, as Christian Jacob put it, “re-establish our country in the greatness it has” and “build the France of tomorrow”, the conservatives also propose investing what would be the historic sum of 25 billion euros over five years (the length of the presidential term and that of parliament) in modernising the equipment of police and security forces, including vehicles, police and gendarmerie stations, and technological tools.
Globally, the LR pledges to introduce a tougher justice system, one in which the reduction of sentences is a rarity. It promises the reintroduction of minimum and unmodifiable jail terms, a “radically” simplified criminal code, and the cutting of family welfare benefits for the parents of young delinquents.
Borrowing some ideas from François Fillon
The programme borrows large chunks of the manifesto of the party’s 2017 presidential candidate, former prime minister François Fillon (whose campaign eventually collapsed over allegations he had embezzled public funds by falsely declaring his wife as his parliamentary assistant, of which both were convicted last year, which they are appealing). They include ending access to healthcare accorded to undocumented migrants, increasing the defence budget, the introduction of yearly quotas for immigrant numbers, the creation of a single form of welfare payment with a ceiling value of 75% of the minimum legal wage, in order, the party argues, “that work always brings in more than handouts”. It also proposes to sell off subsidised, publicly-owned housing to help people access home ownership, while placing a maximum ceiling on the number of rented, publicly-owned “social” lodgings in some districts, and giving hospitals autonomous management of their finances.
But what it does not borrow from Fillon’s programme (and which at the time even shocked a section of the Right) is his plan to privatise the social security system, lengthening the working week to 39 hours paid on the basis of 37 hours, and the axing of 500,000 jobs in the public sector.
“The current period is absolutely not the same as in 2017,” observed Senator Bruno Retailleau, who leads the LR group in the upper house and who remains loyal to Fillon, speaking to Mediapart in January. “France will emerge poly-traumatised from these past years. That must be taken into account. Today we need a protective state.”
Indeed, there is no question of attempting to get the French to swallow a pill as big as that which candidates in the 2016 primaries of the conservatives and centre-right were proposing. All but one of them pledged to reduce public spending by between 85-100 billion euros over five years. Now, the party proposes a “strategy for the recovery of public finances”, but with a “stability in the total volume of spending”. In short, the conservatives are abandoning their past manifesto pillar of slashing the number of public sector employees.
The LR programme also, and for the first time, contains a small dose of sovereignism. “The crisis that we are going through questions the state in its mission of protection,” the document declares. It pledges to “re-arm the state”, identifying those strategic areas that are the priority for investment, like defence, healthcare, and food production.
Borrowing also from the far-right
The party is notably on the attack over issues linked to law and order, and Islam, and on the issue of alternative and renewable energy production. The programme presented this weekend underlines its support for nuclear-powered energy and even pledges to end public funding of wind turbine parks and solar energy. That is an approach already adopted by the far-right Rassemblement National party, which placed it at the centre of debates during the regional elections held in June.
Because it believes that its electorate has, over the years, become more radical, the LR has integrated into its manifesto some of the propositions that were previously unique to the far-right. That is the case, for example, concerning the proposal to automatically place those convicted of terrorist crimes in special reformative detention centres after they have served their sentence (currently only convicted criminals with serious personality disorders, who are regarded as posing a threat of repeat offending, are placed in such centres). Another example is the proposal to ban the wearing of headscarves by mothers escorting school trips, or the creation of a mandatory four-month national service (which even François Fillon opposed in 2017, describing the far-right idea as being “rag-bag and costly”).
Finally, the programme also announced that if the LR wins power, it will overturn a law adopted in 2014 under the then socialist government which limits the number of concurrent elected posts a politician can have. It pledged to authorise “mayors to again exercise a parliamentary mandate”. Already in 2017, elected members of the party had insistently called, in vain, on their candidate Fillon to abrogate the law.
It will now be for the party’s 2022 candidate to make a choice on the issue, like on all the others, when he or she comes to the moment of melting the party’s programme into their own election manifesto.
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- The original French version of this report can be found here.
English version by Graham Tearse