The right-wing National Rally (RN) of Marine Le Pen and Jordan Bardella is considering strategic moves to reach out to the Republicans (LR), France’s classic right-wing party, in an attempt to expand its base and establish a majority to form a government after the legislative elections.
“We will study each electoral district on a case-by-case basis,” Bardella told the press on Monday (1st), when asked about the possibility of some of his candidates withdrawing from the second round next Sunday (7) and thus paving the way for the victory of other right-wing candidates.
At the entrance to a meeting of the RN executive committee, the candidate for prime minister acknowledged that “a certain number of decisions will have to be taken”.
“If we have to avoid a possible victory for the candidates of La France Insoumise (LFI) and the far left, we will examine each case individually,” Bardella stressed, referring to the resignation of some of his candidates, before stressing that “obviously” this will not be done to favor French President Emmanuel Macron.
The RN and its conservative allies obtained 33.15% of the votes in the first round of the legislative elections this Sunday, a resounding and unprecedented victory that now awaits to see how it will materialize in the number of seats in the second round, where the configurations in the duels and triangulars will have a lot of weight in the dispute for the electoral districts at stake.
The first projections made by research institutes indicate that it is very unlikely that Bardella’s party will obtain an absolute majority (at least 289 seats) with the support of the president of LR, Éric Ciotti, who imploded his party by making a pact with the nationalist right.
The survey company Elabe is one of the few that contemplates this possibility, estimating that RN could obtain between 255 and 295 deputies.
In this way, Bardella, who has stated that he will only govern if he has an absolute majority, because otherwise he would not be able to implement his program, is extending ties to the leadership of the LR and other right-wing candidates, who together obtained 10% of the votes in the first round and who, according to Elabe, could obtain 35 to 45 seats.
The line that the LR has drawn is not to retreat in the electoral circles in which it managed to get through to the second round and not to give voting instructions in the remaining ones, after having harshly criticized both the New Popular Front, which brings together left-wing parties, and the RN, warning that “its demagogic program will bring chaos and impoverishment to our country”.
In addition to the possible rapprochement with LR, the focus of Bardella’s speech for the second round is to warn of the “existential danger for France” that the New Popular Front of left-wing parties represents in his eyes.
Bardella has tried hard to present next Sunday’s vote as a confrontation between his proposal, “a responsible break”, and that of the leader of the LFI, Jean-Luc Mélenchon, aware that his figure is very controversial even among the left and constitutes a real scarecrow for voters from the center and the right.
#Pens #party #considers #rapprochement #classical