Aurélien Pradié , deputy leader of France's Les Républicains party, which is supporting President Emmanuel Macron's draft lesgislation to raise the retirment age, now being debated in parliament, has been sacked over his public opposition to the bill.
Since President Emmanuel Macron's party lost its absolute majority last year, the government under prime minister Élisabeth Borne needs votes from the conservative Les Républicains to pass the unpopular reform in parliament.
Ciotti, who is on record as saying he wants to stop what he calls a "migratory invasion" of France, won 53.7% of the votes against senator Bruno Retailleau, who scored 46.3%.
In her first address as the French conservatives' presidential candidate, Valérie Pécresse vowed to break with President Emmanuel Macron's centrist policies and to defeat the extremism of her far-right presidential rivals.
Valérie Pécresse's victory in becoming the presidential candidate for the right-wing Les Républicains for the 2022 election has been greeted with an opinion poll suggesting she can defeat incumbent President Emmanuel Macron. However, the president of the Paris region is faced with a political quandary: how does she retain support from those who backed her nearest challenger for the candidacy, right-winger Éric Ciotti, who are attracted by the far right, without repelling the “moderate” right-wing voters who currently support Macron? As Ilyes Ramdani reports, it is the first key strategic challenge of her campaign - and perhaps the most crucial one.
President of Paris region Valérie Pecresse will face Eric Ciotti, a staunch right-winger, in the runoff to be Les Republicains’ candidate in the French presidential election in April.
Michel Barnier, a former EU commissioner and chief Brexit negotiator for the bloc, is one of five contenders to become the presidential candidate for France’s conservative Les Républicains party, which will choose the nominee in a vote this week. Barnier, 70, has moved from outsider to frontrunner, the result of a remarkable ideological U-turn; once a champion of European integration and a ‘humanist’ approach to immigration, which he regarded as a positive phenomenon, he now pledges to suspend further immigration and to make France independent of the EU's legal institutions. As Ilyes Ramdani reports, Barnier’s sudden shift rightwards has proved a strategic success, notably among the nationalist current in his party.
Ahead of next year’s presidential elections, France’s conservative party, Les Républicains, has yet to choose its candidate to stand against a widely expected, although as yet unannounced, re-election bid by Emmanuel Macron. But the party has now published its policy programme. Ilyes Ramdani reports.
The first round of France's regional and département or county elections took place on Sunday June 20th and one of the major stories of the day was the record level of abstention, with nearly two out of three voters staying home. A year before the presidential election another key outcome was the poor showing of the far-right Rassemblement National (RN), led by Marine Le Pen, which despite doing well in opinion polls only came top in one region. Elsewhere the biggest winners of the night were the conservative Right, while the vote for the Left and the Greens held up better than many had predicted. Perhaps the biggest loser of the night was Emmanuel Macron's ruling La République en Marche party which failed even to come second in any region. The second and final round of voting takes place on Sunday June 27th. Mathilde Goanec, Ellen Salvi, Lucie Delaporte, Ilyes Ramdani and Pauline Graulle report.
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Polling agencies estimate that France's traditional conservative party will win the first round of regional elections, with Marine Le Pen's far-right party performing worse than expected.
The French conservative party, Les Républicains, once a main force in French politics but which has seen its support crumble since 2017 amid the emergence of Emmanuel Macron's centre-right movement and a series of fraud scandals surrounding its old guard, has elected MP Christian Jacob as its new leader.
The current chairman of the powerful finance committee at the National Assembly, Éric Woerth, has been placed under formal investigation over the affair involving Libyan funding of Nicolas Sarkozy's 2007 election campaign. Member of Parliament Woerth, who was treasurer of Sarkozy's campaign and later budget minister, faces an investigation over “collusion in illicit financing of an election campaign”. It is claim he concealed a massive influx of cash in the campaign accounts. Former president Nicolas Sarkozy is already under investigation in relation to the affair. Fabrice Arfi and Karl Laske report.
