The LR primary, the last chance for the right to exist?

The five candidates for the primary of the right meet Monday evening on LCI for the first of four televised debates. The time has come for the confrontation of programs for Michel Barnier, Xavier Bertrand, Éric Ciotti, Philippe Juvin and Valérie Pécresse, after several weeks of uncertainties on the voting system. Time will be short to convince Republican activists before the internal ballot, scheduled for early December, which must decide which of these candidates is best placed to bring the right to the presidential election next April.

“Give the right a chance to exist for the next five years”

Three short weeks to meet at the beginning of December with (finally) a single candidate, able (that’s the stake) to play his place in the second round of the presidential election against Emmanuel Macron. To date, the outgoing president is qualified regardless of the situation. Three short weeks therefore to create a breath and to give the right a chance to exist in the next five years.

For the moment, the candidacy of the government right does not really exist. For months, the Republican Party has focused on purely internal issues (primary or not primary, open to all French or reserved only for activists, compulsory crossing point or not …). All this had no chance of mobilizing the French. On the right, we talked more about cooking than about recipes to turn the country around. This will be the first challenge of the debate tonight: to talk about programs.

Programs pulled to the right

The five candidates do not really have different proposals. The main break is on immigration and security issues. Eric Zemmour’s media breakthrough and Emmanuel Macron’s rather poor record in this area have undeniably pulled the programs to the right, towards more authority, controls and sanctions. The most rigorous in this area will be Eric Ciotti, but he is closely followed by the other four debaters.

For the rest, they will all propose lower taxes, lower public spending, to try to control the country’s debt. They will all propose a reduction in the total number of civil servants, taking good care, of course, not to hit the health workforce or the police and the gendarmerie, or Education. And they will all have a reasonable and controlled conversion component of the economy towards less fossil fuels.

All of this is classic, quite predictable, quite similar. And that is why the debate this evening must bring something else: it must serve to reveal the personalities, to bring out the characters. It must allow to create the moment of the right. Since the summer, we have had successively (and in a more or less ephemeral way) the Jean-Luc Mélenchon moment, then that of the ecologists, the Edouard Philippe moment (with a more distant horizon), the moment of Anne Hidalgo, the one Eric Zemmour, and almost every day the moments of Emmanuel Macron, more present than ever without being officially in campaign. If the right wants to have a chance to exist, it is its turn. It is now.

Address activists as a priority

To exist, to whom must the right speak? This is the whole difficulty: the primary is only open to Republican activists up to date on November 16. They are the ones who will nominate the sole candidate of the right and the center, it is therefore to them, the activists, that the five debaters must address as a priority. However, the average point of view of inserts in a party is always quite divisive, more in any case than that of the average French. The dosage will therefore be interesting to monitor.

That’s all that’s going to be played out tonight. With an additional dimension, a total unknown this one: the Covid. For 18 months, the epidemic alone took center stage in the media. If a fifth wave were to be confirmed, if the virus again became the major concern of the French, if, in fact, the Head of State regained the predominant role (for the worse, then for the better) which had been his for 18 months economic and health crisis, then, debate or not, there would be no real room for a moment of the right. Beginning of the response 24 hours after the first debate, with Emmanuel Macron’s speech, Tuesday evening. “