France’s opposition UMP party votes today to pick a successor to ex-president Nicolas Sarkozy after a bitter battle that will determine whether it veers to the right – or even the far right – or holds to the centre.
The cautious, staid François Fillon, who was prime minister for five years until Sarkozy was ousted by the Socialist Francois Hollande in May, is squaring off against Jean-Francois Cope, the party’s populist secretary-general.
The man closest to the hearts of UMP followers remains Sarkozy himself, according to an IFOP opinion poll that said that two-thirds of them hope he will make a comeback and run for the presidency in 2017.
Sarkozy has hinted he might do just that, but in his absence it is Fillon who is favourite to take a majority of the 300,000 votes of UMP members.
The 58-year-old is conservative on economic issues but inclusive on social matters. He argues that Cope’s bid to attract the five million French who voted for the far-right National Front in the presidential election risks splitting the UMP.
Cope, 48, has taken up where Sarkozy left off, unabashed in his bid to woo voters from the National Front, whose historically strong score at the polls split the right-wing vote and torpedoed Sarkozy’s re-election bid.
His rallies have focused on themes that Sarkozy relentlessly pushed, such as immigration and the growing number of Muslims in France, which has Europe’s biggest Islamic community.
He last month published A Manifesto for an Uninhibited Right, in which he argued that the poor immigrant suburbs of French cities had become havens of “anti-white racism”.
Cope, whom critics dub ‘Sarkozy light’ and who has promised to stand aside if his mentor seeks re-election in 2017, followed that up with a tweet about a boy who had his chocolate cake snatched from him by “thugs” who were apparently enforcing the Muslim Ramadan fast.
Cope’s provocative rhetoric shocks many centred-minded UMP supporters, as did Sarkozy’s before him.
Many of them believe the future of the UMP is much safer in the hands of the restrained and urbane Fillon, who shares Cope’s views on economic policy and the EU but who wants to steer the party more toward the centre.
“Some people think they can win France by taking all the turns to the right,” Fillon, who remained popular while Sarkozy’s prime minister even as his boss hit record lows in the polls, told a campaign rally on Monday.
“But I am convinced that it will be won by the right, by the centre, and even by the left,” he said.
The UMP election battle comes as the popularity of Hollande’s Government tumbles in the polls as it struggles to rein in a huge budget deficit and deal with economic crisis.
Hollande’s popularity ratings have fallen to an all-time low, with only 36 per cent of the French expressing confidence in him in November, according to a TNS Sofres-Sopra poll for Le Figaro magazine.
His score in the six months after a presidential election is the lowest since Jacques Chirac tallied 37 per cent in 1995.
Hollande’s predecessor Sarkozy was polling 57 per cent support in 2007 six months into his presidency.