Former president Nicolas Sarkozy faces a new obstacle to his return to power: growing opposition to his attempt to rename his centre-right party “Les Républicains”, reports The Independent.
Senior figures within the Union pour un Mouvement Populaire (UMP), including Mr Sarkozy’s great rival Alain Juppé, are mounting a rearguard action against his plans to bulldoze the new title through a party conference at the end of next month. They object to Les Républicains for several reasons.
Some say it sounds “too American”. Others complain that it is presumptuous – and dangerous – for one party to claim sole ownership of France’s “republican values” of liberty, equality and fraternity. Edouard Phillipe, the mayor of Le Havre and a leading Juppé supporter, says that associating the word republic with the main centre-right party will empty the word “of all meaning”.
Mr Juppé’s opposition is also tactical. He suspects the rebranding is part of a Sarkozy strategy to hijack the party as a personal bandwagon for the 2017 presidential elections.
If the UMP acquires a new Sarkozy-ordained name, Mr Juppé fears, the former president will seem the natural choice for centre-right supporters when they select their presidential candidate in a primary election in November next year. Mr Juppé, 69, a former prime minister and foreign minister and now the mayor of Bordeaux, is Mr Sarkozy’s principal rival for the centre-right nomination.
The battle over the party’s name is, therefore, more than a question of semantics or taste, or unwillingness to be associated with the party of George W Bush. It is a first round in a struggle within the centre-right to thwart Mr Sarkozy’s ambitions to become the first defeated French president of recent times to run for a new term of office.