Laurent Wauquiez has done the easy part. It was never seriously in doubt that the 42-year-old was going to win last night’s contest to elect the new leader of Les Républicains, a position vacated by François Fillon after his humiliating presidential campaign in May. But now for the real test: challenging the hegemony of Emmanuel Macron.
In the six months since he became the youngest president of the 5th Republic, the 39-year-old Macron has invaded centre-right territory. Not only that but he’s made off with several high-profile Républicains, including Prime Minister Édouard Philippe and Economy Minister Bruno Le Maire. An opinion poll last month revealed that his economic reforms have made him a hit with voters who identity themselves as right-leaning.
It’s not just Macron’s approach to the economy that is winning over Républicain supporters. They approve of his plain-speaking, of his telling aggrieved workers that he’s not Father Christmas, and of the robust exchange he had with a Moroccan woman last week in Paris. She was seeking asylum but Macron told her bluntly to go home. His comments caused uproar with social justice warriors, but not among the silent majority. In six months he’s ridden roughshod over the unions, rebooted France on the international stage and presided over a country that has won the rights to host the 2023 Rugby World Cup and the 2024 Olympic Games.
Nonetheless, Le Monde reported last week that Macron regards the Républicains’ new leader as ‘someone who needs to be taken seriously…he is very determined and very organised’. According to some reports, so determined was Wauquiez to be taken seriously following his election to parliament as a 29-year-old that he dyed his hair grey for a touch more gravitas.
Only three years separate Wauquiez and Macron, who both graduated from the elite ENA school. But they have little else in common, certainly in the way the former is pitching the rivalry. He’s the man of the provinces and Macron a member of the Parisian elite. ‘He has only one project: himself,’ Wauquiez declared in an autumn interview. Describing the president as ‘arrogant and capricious’, he added: ‘I have no idea what vision of France he has. He talks of a start-up nation, not a French nation.’
They also have divergent views on the European Union, with Macron in favour of more expansion. Wauquiez, however, believes the opposite approach is required, explaining in his book, ‘Europe: it must change’, that enlargement has weakened the EU and it has become a bureaucratic behemoth. Europe, however, remains a divisive subject within Les Républicains, and Wauquiez will gain more capital in tackling the president on Islam and immigration. Macron scored some political points with the right with the way he dealt with the Moroccan asylum seeker although the cynic might wonder if the confrontation wasn’t a little too conveniently played out in front of the cameras. His government, though, has been less emphatic in dealing with more pressing immigration problems, such as the deteriorating situation in Calais and districts of Paris.
Similarly, many on the right believe that Macron’s tough-talking on eradicating the influence of the Islamists is just that: talk. In a newspaper column on Friday, Valerie Pécresse, president of the Greater Paris region, warned that the Republic was being challenged by Islamists who are determined to ‘affirm the superiority of religious laws over our Republican laws’. And the response of the government? Passivity and the ’emergence of ‘neither-nor’: neither intervention nor stigmatisation’. A poll last week revealed that Islamic terrorism has supplanted unemployment as the principal preoccupation of the French; and it’s a subject Macron’s enemies believe can be exploited.
But on both Islam and immigration, a delicate touch will be required by Wauquiez. He’s recently been courted by Marine Le Pen, who believes his views reflect her own. Wauquiez rebuffed the advance, saying the leader of the National Front was a political failure. All the same, he wouldn’t mind luring some of her 11million voters to his side, those people who feel, rightly or wrongly, belittled by Macron and his metropolitan credentials. There are some within his own party, however, who worry that Wauquiez is too far to the right, not just on immigration and Islam, but on issues such as gay marriage, to which he is opposed.
Wauquiez knows he has a long, hard road ahead of him. His first step will be to heal the divisions within his party. Then he needs to give Les Républicains a makeover. Too old and too crusty is the view of many young voters, which is why Wauquiez styles himself as the leader of a ‘nouvelle génération’. That was also Macron’s pitch during the election and the president is right to be wary of his energetic new rival, even if he is prematurely grey.
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