In his first seven months in office, President Emmanuel Macron has faced little opposition. But come Sunday, the once-dominant Republicans elect a new leader they hope might recover the party’s voice, reports Reuters.
Frontrunner to lead the party of former presidents Jacques Chirac and Nicolas Sarkozy is Laurent Wauquiez, an ambitious 42-year-old who like Macron passed through the elite ENA school and promises to shake up the political establishment.
There are few policy parallels between the two men, however. Wauquiez is a relentless critic of the 39-year-old president, dismissing him as out of touch with rural France, weak on security and too much in favour of closer European integration.
In his campaign to lead the party, Wauquiez has charted a rightward path to attack Macron’s social and economic reforms.
“The Right is waking up. It is back and I want to be clear: we’re not going to be told what we can say or think any more,” Wauquiez told Reuters.
“The future of France’s democracy cannot be a centrist swamp that gathers both Socialists and right-wingers around Macron.” [nL8N1NT1U5]
He will inherit a party in disarray, divided in its response to both Macron’s poaching of party stalwarts and economic policy that encroaches on their turf.
Its candidate Francois Fillon was eliminated in the first round of this year’s presidential election, and the party has had a caretaker interim leader since.
Wauquiez bills himself as the champion of small-town, rural France - a France, he says, with which Macron has no connection as he pursues a “start-up nation”.
“They have no roots, they are completely out of touch with reality in this country,” Wauquiez told a rally in Provins, outside Paris, referring to Macron and his lieutenants.
Addressing campaign rallies in open-collar shirts, Wauquiez says Macron’s tax policy will hammer the middle class and pensioners, denounces his labour reforms as a sham and accuses the government of being too soft on radical Islam.
He has also drawn up future battlelines over the deeper European integration sought by Macron.