On Sunday, Bruno Retailleau was elected president of Les Republicains – France’s mainstream centre-right party. Just a few years ago, his election would have drawn significant attention across Europe, as the rise of a new leader within a major European political force. Today, however, Les Republicains are the shadow of their former selves: a diminished political party on the right fighting for survival.
In the 2022 presidential election, the party suffered a catastrophic result, receiving just 4.78 per cent of the vote – an all-time low for the party of De Gaulle, Chirac and Sarkozy. Today, polls show the party barely averaging 10 per cent support ahead of the 2027 presidential election, regardless of the candidate. Squeezed between Marine Le Pen’s ascendant National Rally and the fading remnants of Macronism – and challenged on the right by the insurgent Éric Zemmour – Les Républicains struggle to find a viable path back to power. It has now been 13 years since they last held the Élysée.
For too long, the French centre-right has been complacent and intellectually lazy
Retailleau faces a seemingly impossible task. A senator from Vendée, he is a seasoned local politician and skilled parliamentarian. He is also a capable orator, at least within the gilded and frescoed walls of the upper house of the French parliament. He is also the interior minister of the current government led by Francois Bayrou, where he championed efforts to tighten immigration laws against most of his cabinet colleagues and the President himself. He is also a liberal on economic issues with a hint of Euroscepticism.
Les Républicains currently lack both a coherent doctrine and a unifying political figure – two problems Retailleau must urgently address. With Le Pen weakened by ongoing legal troubles and Macronism effectively defunct, a small window of opportunity has opened.
For too long, the French centre-right has been complacent and intellectually lazy. It likes to invoke the legacy of de Gaulle, but constantly name-dropping the father of the Fifth Republic is no substitute for doing the hard work of developing a credible programme for government. Since Sarkozy left office in 2012, successive centre-right leaders all believed that there was a natural order of things in French politics: the political pendulum of democracy would inevitably swing back in their favour. It was just a question of patience. No need to think.
As a result, the party failed to grasp the major shifts in the electorate that have taken place over the past two decades – in particular, the migration of working-class voters away from the left toward the right. In the absence of a compelling offer from the centre-right, those voters found their way to Marine Le Pen. Retailleau would do well to study how the UK Conservative Party capitalised on similar realignments in the wake of the Brexit referendum, winning over working-class constituencies in Northern England and delivering Boris Johnson a sweeping victory in the 2019 general election.
But even if Retailleau manages to formulate a new doctrine to the centre-right – perhaps one resembling the 2019 Conservative playbook – a major challenge remains: many of the centre-right’s target voters still remember Sarkozy’s betrayal of the 2008 Lisbon Treaty and his failures on immigration and national identity.
Breaking with Sarkozy and thirteen years of ideological inertia seems essential to reconnect with voters. As part of this reset, Retailleau must choose between two paths: aligning with the centre in a bid to reclaim Macron’s 2017 coalition from the right, or shifting further right. Retailleau definitely favours the latter, but his decision will be made more complicated by his own position: he remains a key minister in Bayrou’s centrist government, a role that gave him national visibility and helped secure his leadership victory.
But it may already be too late – and there are many reasons for scepticism. Retailleau belongs to a generation of politicians raised in the shadow of dominant figures like Chirac and Sarkozy. He is not an insurgent, nor a populist. His appeal to working-class voters will likely be limited.
The absence of leadership on the centre-right has created a vacuum that only demands to be filled. Now, strange ghosts from the past are reappearing in new forms: Nicolas Sarkozy’s son Louis has hinted at political ambitions. Dominique de Villepin, the former foreign minister best known for opposing the Iraq War, is reportedly considering a 2027 presidential run. A random populist figure, say from the media, could also emerge unexpectedly and take advantage of the dismaying vacuum of leadership. Retailleau will need to fend off these threats as well.
He might find comfort in the fact that he is not alone in Europe to face these challenges. Centre-right parties across Europe face similar dilemmas. The UK Conservatives are under pressure from Reform UK; the German CDU is threatened by the rise of the AfD. So far, most of these parties have chosen short-term survival strategies: stitching together awkward alliances with centrist forces, like the one currently propping up Bayrou’s government in France.
One longer-term answer could be the ‘unification of the right’ – a broad alliance of political parties from Bruno Retailleau all the way to Marine Le Pen. In France, the polemist Eric Zemmour was the first to push for this concept during the presidential campaign of 2022.Although his presidential bid was unsuccessful, polls have shown that most centre-right and right-wing voters would support such an alliance. In the UK, the debate is already open on whether the Tories should partner with Reform UK.
The irony is that ideologically, the divide between the mainstream centre-right and its right-wing competitors has been narrowing dramatically. Today, the National Rally’s ideas are essentially the same as the mainstream French right of the 1990s. The obstacle is the centre-right’s pride and arrogance. They still think that they are the only legitimate governing force. In France, they simply cannot stand the idea that the National Rally could lay claim to the presidential throne and be the senior partner in an alliance by the will of the electorate.
The humiliation of the 2022 presidential election has not yet had the effect of bringing the centre-right back to reality. Time is running out for Retailleau and Les Republicains to change course and build the unification of the right on their own terms. The French centre-right ought to finally get to work.
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