French conservatives choose security
In the long road to France's 2027 presidential election, the vote held on Sunday, May 18, by the conservative Les Républicains (LR) party is merely a step. However, for one man, the result of this vote holds considerable significance. Since 2017, Laurent Wauquiez has presented himself as the savior of the right, the one who could deliver a rupture, much like former president Nicolas Sarkozy a decade earlier.
He was soundly defeated by an opponent he did not see coming, receiving only 25.7% of the votes from LR members, versus 74.3% for Interior Minister Bruno Retailleau. This punishing vote diminishes the former president of the central Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes region's prospects for a 2027 presidential bid.
The rebuke is all the more severe given that Wauquiez, who led LR between 2017 and 2019, was supposed to be more familiar with the inner workings of his party and the expectations of its members than Retailleau, who was defeated in the same election in 2022. Wauquiez's current role as president of the LR group in the Assemblée Nationale also gave him the advantage of claiming to members that he would have the power to make or break the current government of Prime Minister François Bayrou in the coming months. Despite these assets and his repeated references to former president Jacques Chirac as a model, he was clearly rejected.
The choice of security
On the substance, the campaign confirmed the worrying radicalization of the French right. Targeting a common enemy – the radical-left La France Insoumise party – Wauquiez and Retailleau ran on the same themes – security, opposition to immigration, the fight against communitarianism, praise of work, fiscal austerity and the challenge to the rule of law in migration matters – to try to win over the roughly 100,000 voters increasingly sensitive to the far right. What separated the two candidates wasn't policy, but personality.
At 50, Wauquiez suffers from having made many enemies within his own party without having succeeded in forging strong ties with the public. Close to Christian Democrats at the start of his political career, this highly educated individual served multiple times as a minister during Sarkozy's five-year term, gradually radicalizing his discourse to the point of becoming a champion of the union of the right with far-right pundit Éric Zemmour. Wauquiez has opposed almost everything President Emmanuel Macron has done since 2017, including the raising of the retirement age, strongly defended by the right, but unable, to this day, to propose an alternative. He remains trapped by the two adjectives many of his adversaries associate with his name: "brutal" and "insincere."
At a very low point for their party, the LR members have chosen security. At 64, Retailleau, who presided over the LR group in the Sénat for 10 years, embodies an identity-driven right, yet is not averse to compromising with the center. Freshly elected head of the party, the interior minister has adopted Wauquiez's call for "rupture" while proclaiming his intention to remain in the government for the time being. A way to balance competing interests in a particularly unstable political environment. Not glorious, but effective.
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