Ciotti’s boulder

Éric Ciotti, right and centre (Photo: Franotogian, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons)

In these uncertain economic times, one piece of advice should be offered to anyone seeking new employment: do not, whatever you do, become leader of a major Western centre-right party. Your colleagues will hate you, the country will hate you, and you will spend whatever brief, unedifying time you have in office ambling impotently towards electoral failure.

Granted, this is advice that applies to an increasingly small number of people, but this appears to be a group populated by too many owners of ambition-tinted glasses – nobody, appropriately sober of ego’s temptation, would volunteer to lead France’s Les Républicains. Would they?

The man who has begun to sip from this particular poisoned verre du vin is Éric Ciotti, member of the National Assembly representing Alpes-Maritimes’ 1st, the metropolitan core of Nice. The French people’s gentle cultural chauvinism extends to their politics, and the electorate has, so far, largely resisted the ‘global realignment’ witnessed elsewhere – reflecting the attitudes of his affluent constituents, Ciotti is a deeply right-wing conservative (ultranationalist Éric Zemmour won more than 14% of the vote in Nice in last year’s presidential election, compared to 7% nationwide).

Like Germany’s CDU last January, LR have smashed the plastic screen and pressed the big button marked ‘IN CASE OF EMERGENCIES’, which, as it turns out, installs the party’s resident past-their-prime hardliner as leader. Before that, both parties had made the same mistake of pressing the ‘REGIONALLY-POPULAR-BUT-OTHERWISE-UNINSPIRING MODERATE’ button, resulting in bruising election defeats for Europe’s conservative former heavyweights.

Ciotti’s constituency and birthplace, the city of Nice, prefecture (capital) of the wealthy south-eastern department of Alpes-Maritimes (Photo: Martinp1, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons)

For LR, however, the beating was severe; in the 2022 presidential election, they lost three-quarters of their voters and flirted with bankruptcy. This was a party that controlled both the Élysée and the National Assembly just ten years before. There are few examples of any party with roots as deep as theirs obliterating in such rapid and entertaining fashion – except, of course, their long-time rivals, the Parti Socialiste, who managed to destroy themselves the cycle before by installing Pere Ubu’s self-effacing cousin as president (Hollande left office with an approval rating of 4%, lower than that of Prince Andrew in the UK).

The humiliation for the PS did not end in 2017. By 2022, they were so irrelevant that in one polling station the poll workers forgot to put out the ballots for their candidate. And nobody noticed. For two hours. Ciotti’s task, really, is not to restore LR to high office, but instead to avert the kind of pity-inducing “it’s the taking part that counts” performances the PS is becoming used to.

Can he do it? Can Éric Ciotti rescue the party-of-De-Gaulle-sort-of? The 57-year-old first managed a campaign in 2012, organising now-disgraced ex-PM François Fillon’s play for the leadership of LR’s predecessor, the UMP. Fillon lost.

Failing upwards, Ciotti went on to manage now-disgraced ex-President Nicolas Sarkozy’s campaign for the candidacy of LR in the 2016 primaries. Sarkozy lost. Fillon has since been convicted of fraud, and Sarkozy of corruption. So, not only is Ciotti bad at running campaigns, he’s also terrible at picking friends.

This is ominous for LR, given their situation, which is decidedly pas bon. Ciotti only has 60 Assembly members at his disposal – just 10% of the chamber, barely two thirds of the number Le Pen has under her banner – while they have managed to use this small position to wield some influence over Macron, they look to be suffering from the same affliction as the British Tories in the early 2000s; such a small number of representatives means very little talent to draw upon.

Their only remaining strength is at the local level, having been elected in most places as the least-worst option against Le Pen’s candidates. However, the signals are that RN (Le Pen’s party) are experiencing a palatability breakthrough, which could topple LR administrations in regions such as Ciotti’s home of Provence-Alpes-Cotes-d’Azur, where Le Pen won 50.5% of the vote in 2022.

Deep fractures, too, are developing in the party’s leadership and its atrophied base. The most contentious divide is over whether LR should work with the President and his parliamentary minority, or pivot to recapture support lost to their far-right rivals. Ciotti is the champion of the latter camp, asserting that the only difference between LR and RN is the ability to govern, and using the same language on migration as Éric “Great Replacement” Zemmour.

Unfortunately for LR, the party’s wealthiest, most influential deserters belong to the former camp. The euro-soaked retirees and professionals of Neuilly-sur-Seine, Annecy and the Vendee hold the key to rebuilding a centre-right political force; they turn up to the polls like their pension depends on it, with the cash to keep LR in the black.

Ciotti is chasing low-propensity voters who don’t trust the system and, more importantly, don’t trust the old right to do as they say. His rhetoric will alienate the Macronistes without convincing the Houllebecqians.

What Eric Ciotti risks doing with this unidirectional cha-cha-slide is painting the LR into a shrinking corner. Manu is marching right too, but this is logical for a politician of the ostensible centre, especially if the politicians of the centre-right are shifting the same way and leaving behind fertile terroir.

To the other side of LR, Le Pen has unassailable dominion. The coalition Ciotti wants to build doesn’t exist – at least not beyond the terraces of the pretty Provençal towns where Zemmour found his audience, but a few thousand over-tanned and under-taxed grandparents does not a majority make.

Before the leadership election concluded, Ciotti’s opponent, Bruno Retailleau, described the mandate as a Herculean challenge. It will surely require great strength, but whether this will be enough to save LR from having to eat at the PS table in the parliamentary canteen is another question. Probably with quite a brief answer. Instead, Ciotti might realise too late that he was never Hercules, but Sisyphus.

As he reaches the summit of the 2027 mountain, the LR boulder straining at his bloodied hands, he may well find a giant television screen displaying, at the end of the first result projections, the words “Les Républicains”, followed by “septième” and “place”. At which point the boulder will promptly roll back down the mountain, squashing the remaining LR MPs along the way. Even then there will doubtless be somebody deluded enough to push it back up.