French
conservatives are inching towards a pact with Le Pen that could enable a
far-right takeover of the country
Paul
Taylor
In trying
to woo hard-right voters, Les Républicains risk destroying France’s Gaullist
legacy and putting Paris on a collision course with the EU
Thu 20
Nov 2025 05.00 GMT
‘Not one
vote for the left!” That call from Bruno Retailleau, chair of the mainstream
conservative party Les Républicains (LR), helped a candidate allied with Marine
Le Pen’s far-right National Rally (RN) to sweep to victory in a byelection
run-off against a socialist in southwest France last month after the
centre-right candidate was eliminated in the first round.
It was a
clear sign that, despite frequent denials, the much-diminished heirs to Charles
de Gaulle’s conservative movement are inching towards a controversial “union of
the right” that could put Le Pen or her protege, Jordan Bardella, in the Élysée
Palace in 2027.
Gone is
the taboo on any collaboration with the extreme right propounded by Gaullist
president Jacques Chirac when Le Pen’s father, Jean-Marie Le Pen, first reached
the run-off in the 2002 presidential election. Gone, too, is the “republican
front” spanning from the centre-right through president Emmanuel Macron’s
centrists to the radical left France Unbowed (LFI), which stopped the far right
from sweeping the board in a snap parliamentary election just a year ago. Under
that informal pact, parties of the “republican arc” stood down in favour of the
best-placed candidate among them to defeat the RN in the second round.
That
resulted in a three-way deadlocked parliament with weak, revolving-door
governments that has cratered public trust in the mainstream parties and
boosted the RN’s standing.
Every
week brings new evidence that the firewall between the mainstream centre right
and the extreme right is breaking down as Les Républicains struggle for
survival against a surge in voter support for the nationalist, xenophobic and
Eurosceptic RN. Recent opinion polls show the RN has 35% support or higher,
whether their presidential candidate is Le Pen, currently barred from running
by a conviction for embezzling EU funds which she is appealing, or Bardella,
the 30-year-old party president. None of the potential LR candidates scores
even 10%, and backing for centrist contenders is also shrinking.
LR is
locked in a power struggle between Retailleau, who was riding high as a
hardline interior minister until he brought the government down a few weeks
ago, and Laurent Wauquiez, LR’s parliamentary floor leader. Other LR hopefuls,
including northern big political player Xavier Bertrand, are also vying for the
nomination.
Bertrand
is one of the rare Gaullists arguing against any deal with the far right. His
line has little traction among LR members of parliament scrambling to save
their seats, which may require at least a mutual non-aggression pact with Le
Pen’s party. A handful of LR deputies, led by former party leader Éric Ciotti,
broke away and cut such a deal with Le Pen at the last parliamentary election.
Now, pressure for a “union of the right” is mounting – amplified by the
rightwing media empires of billionaires Vincent Bolloré and Pierre-Édouard
Stérin.
Leaders
of Les Républicains are already vying with the far right in shrill rhetoric and
proposals to curb immigration and deny benefits to new immigrants. As interior
minister until September, Retailleau toughened conditions for immigrants to
receive French nationality and campaigned against birthright citizenship. At
present, children of immigrants born on French soil automatically become
citizens when they turn 13 if they have resided in the country for five years.
Mainstream
conservatives keep putting out feelers to the far right. Wauquiez recently met
Éric Zemmour, a radical anti-Islam crusader to the right of Le Pen, to discuss
the idea of holding a presidential primary election open to all contenders from
the centre right to the far right. The RN has no interest in such a contest
because its own candidate is streets ahead in the polls, so a primary looks
unlikely to happen. But raising the idea is a way of building bridges to the
right of LR.
The
problem for Les Républicains is that, barring an electoral miracle, a “union of
the right” will simply ease the hard right’s path to power. As Jean-Marie Le
Pen liked to say, voters prefer the original to the copy. So LR would probably
end up as a junior partner, either joining a government dominated by the RN, as
its sister party Forza Italia has done in hard-right Giorgia Meloni’s
administration in Italy, or propping up an RN administration from outside.
While
this manoeuvring is going on in Paris, LR is cuddling up to the far right in
the European parliament in Brussels, where its group leader, François-Xavier
Bellamy, voted for an RN censure motion against European Commission president
Ursula von der Leyen over her support for an EU trade deal with South American
countries. LR also voted with the hard right against ambitious EU carbon
emissions target for 2040 in a sign of converging hostility to climate-friendly
policies.
The
erosion of the French firewall against the extreme right mirrors the crumbling
of barriers in the EU legislature. The centre-right European People’s party, to
which LR belongs, is increasingly willing to push through its deregulation
agenda with far-right votes when it cannot press the centrist and socialist
groups into loosening environmental reporting requirements and liabilities for
business. It did so in a 13 November vote on corporate sustainability and
supply-chain transparency rules.
French
conservative leaders insist that they want Le Pen’s voters, not her party’s
leaders. But when faced with the choice of losing their remaining town halls or
cutting deals with the RN in municipal elections next March, there is little
doubt that LR will go for local agreements, even if that means the election of
more RN mayors and councillors.
If Les
Républicains become the enablers of a hard-right takeover of France, which
rolls back citizenship and welfare rights and puts Paris on a collision course
with the EU, this is likely to break the party and spell the end of the
Gaullist legacy in French politics – as well as discrediting the party morally.
Paul
Taylor is a senior visiting fellow at the European Policy Centre
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