France’s hardline interior minister Bruno Retailleau was on Sunday elected as chairman of the French conservative party, Les Républicains (LR), in a landslide victory over his only rival, Laurent Wauquiez, leader of the party’s parliamentary group and who was briefly chairman of LR between 2017 and 2019.
Retailleau, 64, a senator largely unknown to the wider public before entering government last September, garnered 74.3% of the vote by 121,617 members and militants of LR, once a party of government up until 2012, since when it has been in steady decline, notably since the centre-right movement of Emmanuel Macron came to power in 2017.
With just 50 Members of Parliament (MPs) out of the National Assembly’s total of 577, it has fallen well behind the 120 seats of the far-right Rassemblement National (RN) party, now the dominant force of the French Right.
Retailleau was appointed interior minister in September last year in France’s minority coalition government under prime minister and fellow LR member Michel Barnier. After it was brought down by a no-confidence vote in parliament, Retailleau was re-confirmed in the post under Barnier’s successor, François Bayrou, Emmanuel Macron’s centre-right ally, whose government is similarly fragile, living from one month to the next under threat of another no-confidence vote.
Retailleau, a practicing Catholic and father of three, has carved himself a reputation as a hardline figure, courting the hard- and far-right by championing tough policies on immigration and criminality, while fiercely critical of so-called “wokeism” and advocating an austere review of France’s social benefits system.
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His first real test as leader of the party will be its performance in the nationwide municipal elections due in March next year, when the far-right is tipped to make strong gains. But he above all has his eye on presidential elections due in the spring of 2027, at the end of Emmanuel Macron’s second and final term in office. In what was previously predicted to be far-right figurehead Marine Le Pen’s hour at last, after three attempts to reach the Élysée Palace, her participation in the presidential election may well be compromised pending her appeal against a conviction for defrauding the European Parliament, when she was handed a five-year ban on holding public office.
Renewed confidence for the conservatives
“It is an important stage,” said Retailleau, interviewed by television channel TF1 shortly after his victory was announced on Sunday evening. “What we can do today with [the party’s] militants, I am sure we can do tomorrow with the electorate that the Right has disappointed by not sticking to its commitments.”
Concerning the substance, his election, and the size of his victory, does not give an insight into what the party’s militant base really thinks on policy matters, given that Retailleau and his rival Wauquiez put forward very similar manifestos; the same tough stands on immigration and law and order, the same liberal approach on economic policies, and the same diatribes against the Left and “wokeism”.
But the absence of a third candidate in the party’s election process would appear to show, along with the wave of membership applications and re-applications prior to the vote (open only to LR card carriers), that the party’s supporters are satisfied with its gravitation now firmly towards the Right.
But it is above all a chance of winning that LR militants chose on Sunday – a ticket for the second and final two-horse round of the presidential election that only Retailleau, among the party’s top rung, appears able to reach. It is a major consideration for a party that was blown away in the first round of the 2022 presidential poll, when its candidate, Valérie Pécresse, garnered just 4.8% of votes cast. It also explains how the interior minister has won support from all the different components of the mainstream Right, from those still nostalgic for the late rightwing president Jacques Chirac to the traditionalist Catholics, along with the standard bearers of socially conscious conservatism and the sovereigntists.
Retailleau will have considerable freedom of action within his camp given the size of his victory on Sunday. Before the result was announced, party insiders were talking of a 60% share of the vote as being a clear triumph over his rival, and the thumping majority he finally obtained was a surprise to some among his inner circle.
Once a rising star, Wauquiez heads back to Earth
Meanwhile, for Laurent Wauquiez, 50, who was telling his supporters right up to the end of the campaigning that he would be LR leader “as of Monday”, it was a humiliation. After standing down as a Member of Parliament (MP) in 2017, following 13 years representing a constituency in the Haute-Loire département (county) in south-central France, Wauquiez focussed on his role as president of the Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes regional council and, for two years, that as leader of LR. Standing again and re-elected as MP in 2024 in what has become his fiefdom in the Haute-Loire, some observers saw his path to becoming leader of the party once more as given. But that was to ignore his reputation for insincerity.
Wauquiez, head of the LR parliamentary group in the lower house, the National Assembly, initially argued in favour of reaching an agreement with Emmanuel Macron after the latter’s disastrous dissolving of the National Assembly last year which left his centre-right party Renaissance in a minority amid a hung parliament. But in the end Wauquiez refused to enter a coalition government last September under Michel Barnier, in which he had been offered the economy ministry, a perilous post in the case of a minority government. Wauquiez had lobbied to become interior minister, but that was flatly turned down by Macron – a post which instead went to Retailleau.
While his score in the LR leadership contest was that of a minor candidate, it had apparently not altered his presidential ambition at least if one was to believe his speech on Sunday. After addressing Retailleau with his best wishes for “success”, Wauquiez pledged to put his all into building a “project of rupture” with the past for France. “There is a real expectation, there is a real path” he insisted, without any reference to the score he obtained. While the presidential election is two years away, and while just one week, as the saying goes, is a long time in politics, it seems difficult to imagine Wauquiez in a position to challenge Retailleau after the result of May 18th.
The latter has reaped the benefit of what was the most paying strategy of his career – that of entering government. He did so after spending seven years, as a conservative senator, criticising Macron and slamming all those figures from the Right who jumped ship to join the centre-right president.
Since entering government, Retailleau has repeated over and again that he did so “to block the road” of the radical-left, arguing that if Macron could not compose a government with the Right then he would have had to do so with the leftwing coalition dominated by Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s party, La France Insoumise. It is a delicate exercise, balancing himself between a required loyalty to the government and his desire for emancipation. But he has now successfully rid himself of what he in private admitted was his principal handicap, namely being largely unknown.
Since his appointment as interior minister last September, Retailleau can be found seemingly everywhere commenting on every issue of law and order, invited on an almost daily basis into radio and television studios, using his ministerial post as a springboard for the presidential elections. It is a copy of the method employed by Nicolas Sarkozy in his own strategy for election as head of state, and which, 20 years on, has produced its first triumph. Sarkozy was also elected as leader of the conservative UMP party, now renamed LR, two and a half years before he won the 2007 presidential election.
While he never expressed the idea, the support he garnered from the LR membership suggests he is in line to become the party’s chosen presidential candidate. The new darling of the media empire controlled by billionaire tycoon Vincent Bolloré, and in good stead with the presidential camp and that of the far-right, Retailleau ticks many of the boxes currently favoured by the Right.
The spectre of a tripartite union of all the Right
Yet his position as minister, invaluable for his recent meteoric rise, is a double-edged sword. Once the fervour settles, he will be confronted with the concrete results of his ministry and the government to which he belongs – and which has disowned his tough approach amid current tensions with Algeria. He will face questions over the inevitable failures of his hard approach to immigration and law and order. “It is impossible to get results in this ministry,” commented, off the record, one of his government colleagues.
Another problem is his position of “one foot in, one foot out”, causing him to tone down his criticism of the Macron camp. With regard to the presidential elections, he will have to explain why he is presenting himself against this centre-right, and Right-fringed, block, which includes presidential hopeful Édouard Philippe, Macron’s first prime minister, having himself served within the same coalition. Some are already advising Retailleau to cut loose from government to prepare for 2027 by engineering a dispute and slamming the door.
While that might be an appealing scenario on paper, it would be harder to put in place in reality because he would lose the privileged position the interior ministry offers as a soapbox. It would also appear as an admission of failure, which others would take advantage of.
Retailleau now has the task of breathing new life into a party still traumatised by the desertion of its former leader, Éric Ciotti, who has left LR and allied himself with the far-right. The new LR chairman must turn to the thankless missions of renewing the party’s ideological core, still stuck in the past, to prepare it for next year’s municipal elections and also the possibility of snap general elections, and to put in place a new generation of national and local party cadres. It is only after that that he can turn to seriously planning for the presidency.
Another possibility is that LR becomes a complimentary, but key, force amid a tripartite French political scene. The centrist presidential hopeful Édouard Philippe has avoided criticism of Retailleau (both were members at the same time of the conservative UMP party). Far-right Rassemblement National party figurehead Marine Le Pen and its chairman Jordan Bardella have also shown a certain indulgence towards the interior minister.
The thinking in both cases is the same, namely that if the LR cannot win an election it could become a key, indispensable force in a political landscape that is more fractured than ever before in the Fifth Republic, the current constitution established in 1958. Whether it is the centre-right or the far-right that succeeds Emmanuel Macron in 2027, it is not improbable that the new head of state would have to turn to Retailleau’s party to ensure a parliamentary majority. The possibility of that is yet another sign of a worrying blurring of political borders.
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- The original French version of this article can be found here.
English version, with some additional reporting, by Graham Tearse