French Right: Youth Conversation Cuts ‘Cordon Sanitaire’

The Left should be quaking in their boots. In the presidential elections last year, these three parties combined received 53.31% of the vote.

From The European Conservative

By Hélène De Lauzun

The outcry caused by a simple article proves that the road to the Union of the Rights is still long, extremely long. But the seeds have been sown, and time is on the Right side.

For a week now, the cover of the conservative magazine L’Incorrect has been displayed on the front of French newsstands, showing three young leaders of the main right-wing parties rubbing shoulders with an almost friendly complicity. Could it be that the long-awaited and increasingly improbable “union of the French Right” had become tangible and credible? This was all it took to trigger a small political earthquake in the face of a rapprochement that some consider shameful and scandalous.

On Friday, March 3rd, passers-by discovered a front page carefully designed to strike hard. It shows a smiling Guilhem Carayon, head of the young Les Républicains, joking with Stanislas Rigault, president of Generation Z (the youth movement of the Reconquête party led by Éric Zemmour), and Pierre-Romain Thionnet, his counterpart for the Rassemblement National. The slogan accompanying the photo was wisely chosen by the editors: “Les jeunes coupent le cordon” (The youth cuts the cord). This expression in French refers to the umbilical cord (‘to cut the cord’ means to free oneself from one’s parents, and more broadly, from one’s elders), but it also cleverly plays on the famous ‘cordon sanitaire’, a political concept invented by the Left at the time of François Mitterrand which insists on the need to isolate the national right-wing parties from the rest of the body politic in order to avoid ‘contamination’ by their dangerous ideas.

Dans les locaux de l'Incorrect, les jeunes représentants des 3 partis de droite se sont retrouvés pour balayer les grands sujets du moment et éprouver l'étendue de leur compatibilité.

2h de débat retranscrit dans les pages de notre dernier numéro, disponible vendredi ! pic.twitter.com/MZYThuBxsO

— L'Incorrect (@MagLincorrect) March 1, 2023

The editorial message is clear: if, for the time being, the union of the Right in France seems unattainable because the heads of the parties concerned are working so hard to make it fail, the future may be brighter, because the younger generation is more flexible and less sectarian, and we are providing proof of this. 

In a word: let’s hope. The idea was clever—but not to everyone’s taste.

Unsurprisingly, various leaders of the Left screamed at this alliance of circumstance that to them looked like a proto-fascist rally. The left-wing investigative newspaper Mediapart reminds us that the label of ‘right-wing’ no longer applies to the RN, a party that would have included former Waffen-SS in its ranks, or to Reconquête, an advocate of ‘remigration.’ 

This vitriol was to be expected from the Left. 

What’s distressing is that even within the Republicans, the indignation was there. For many of the party’s senior executives, the cordon sanitaire is a reality with which they do not joke around. 

For Xavier Bertrand, the former unsuccessful candidate for the LR presidential primary, who keeps one foot in the party and one foot out, the innuendo of the front page of L’Incorrect is quite simply a scandal. He went so far as to speak of “manipulation” in relation to the photo, possibly implying a Stalinist-type trickery, and summoned the young Guilhem Carayon to give explanations—or even to denounce the newspaper. One of Bertrand’s relatives even called for Carayon to resign from his role as party spokesman. On the radio station RMC, Bertrand did not mince words when he colorfully stated: “I’m fed up with all this [expletive].” 

Many think like Bertrand. His disparagement of rapprochement is consistent with the wishes of a significant proportion of Les Républicains members, who, according to a survey published a few months ago by Le Figaro, and analysed in our columns, are not in favour of a union of the Right with such partners. For them, a rapprochement with the ‘extreme Right’—embodied by Reconquête and the Rassemblement national—is a political crime, a moral fault.

Others, within Les Républicains, preferred to play down the incident. Éric Ciotti, the president of the party, had “nothing to say” about the interview. As for Bruno Retailleau, head of Les Républicains in the Senate, he believes that Carayon was respectful of the party line, and that there is nothing shameful in discussing with his “opponents”—he does not speak of potential allies—which is the very condition for the exercise of democracy.

Faced with this outcry, Guilhem Carayon had to make amends and explain that he had indeed been “tricked” by the choice of the editors of L’Incorrect to put such a photo and slogan on the cover. He went so far as to defend himself in the columns of a left-wing newspaper like Libération: 

It’s a chimera. LR and RN cannot marry. Pradié [a candidate for the presidency of the party] says the same thing as me: neither Macronist nor Lepenist. I’m 100% on the party line. I was just there for an interview. I was just tricked, in the sense that the title is fallacious.

In the end, though, he says he is tired of having to justify himself, and refuses to fall into the trap of the Left, which wants to “forbid us to debate together.”

The necessity for Carayon to indulge in a self-criticism session proves, if it were necessary, the power of the moral pressure that the Left still exerts on French political life, and its self-imposed responsibility to hand out trophies for good conduct and political correctness. 

Le Figaro‘s editorial director, Alexis Brézet, is rightly indignant about this response from the Right, drawing, sarcastically, a parallel with the NUPES left-wing coalition: “Imagine Melenchonist, communist, socialist, and green leaders displaying themselves on the front page of Libération?” The Left has no concern for political correctness; if the Left does it, why not the Right? For Brézet, the union of the Right resembles a “scarecrow” waved by the Left to paralyze the Right—we saw it in action with Carayon’s disavowal. The Republican party—which is experiencing a real electoral attrition that nothing seems to stop—proves in this affair, once again, its inability to assume an original identity in a political system that it neither controls nor dictates the rules of the game. 

Reactions to the other two young men, interviewed alongside Carayon, were very different. They weren’t pressured to give pledges of respectability or compelled to ask forgiveness for anything. Éric Zemmour was pleased with this cross-interview featuring his protégé Stanislas Rigault: “Bravo to them. The dialogue between young right-wingers is the first step before the union of the Rights,” he said on Twitter. This time, there was none of the invectives commonly heard from him when he refers to LR or RN supporters. 

The Rassemblement National also welcomed the article in L’Incorrect, which is fully in line with the party’s official discourse: the RN is now a party like any other, which engages in dialogue with the other parties on an equal footing, and if a union of the Rights is to take place, it should be with the RN as the linchpin—without any alternative. 

Nevertheless, we must remain sharp: the outcry caused by a simple article proves that the road is still long, extremely long. But the seeds have been sown, and time is on the Right side. 

Pierre-Romain Thionnet explains it straightforwardly in the interview, in response to the journalist’s question: “Would you say that you belong to the same camp that could be described as national?” He answered “With Stanislas (Rigault), we have an almost identical programmatic background,” indicating then that 

for Guilhem (Carayon), the question is more a question of generation. I don’t feel close to many of the older members of his party, but when I talk to him or other young LR members, I have the feeling that we belong to the same camp and that we speak the same language.

His conclusion? “In order not to live fifteen years of our lives under this Macronian regime, I hope we will fight together.” We can’t wish for anything else.