The leader of France's right-wing Les Républicains on Tuesday, June 11, backed an alliance in snap legislative elections with the far-right Rassemblement National (RN) of Marine Le Pen. "We need to have an alliance (...) an alliance with the RN and its candidates," Eric Ciotti told TF1 television, setting out a position set to be hugely controversial within his own traditional right-wing party.
"I want my political family to move in this direction," Ciotti said. "A force must rise up to oppose the impotence of Macronism and the danger of LFI [La France Insoumise, radical left]." He said he had spoken to the far-right Rassemblement National leaders Marine Le Pen and Jordan Bardella.
Le Pen hailed Ciotti's declaration as "courageous" in a statement to Agence France-Presse.
To explain his decision, taken on a "personal line," Ciotti said that LR is today "too weak" to oppose "the unholy alliance" formed on the left and "the Macronist bloc."
"It's an agreement that will concern the entire national territory," he explained, prescribing that all LR MPs who "wish to do so" would have no "RN competitors" facing them. "We need an alliance" with the RN to build "a bloc of the right, a national bloc," he added, despite calls from within his not to enter into such an agreement.
"I think the country has never been so right-wing," Ciotti said. "It expects the right, it expects right-wing action. We can no longer rely on impotence, on communication, on a form of immobilism that has led us to where we are now."