Rassemblement pour la République

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The Rassemblement pour la République (RPR; German: "Union for the Republic" or "Collection Movement for the Republic") was a French political party . The RPR belonged to the political right , its orientation can be described as Gaullist and conservative . She pursued the idea of ​​a continuation of the politics of Charles de Gaulle and the myth of the Resistance during the Second World War . It owed its foundation to an initiative of the later Paris Mayor and French President Jacques Chirac in 1976. In the following decades, the RPR was the strongest party in the bourgeois spectrum and in most elections it formed alliances with the Union pour la démocratie française (UDF). RPR politicians were Prime Minister 1986-88 and 1993-97, from 1995 the party with Chirac provided the state president. After the presidential election in 2002 , the RPR dissolved in favor of the center-right rallying party Union pour un mouvement populaire (UMP).

Party leader

history

Jacques Chirac - founder and long-time chairman of the RPR

founding

The Gaullist party, which ruled under various names - Union pour la Nouvelle République (UNR) and Union des démocrates pour la République (UDR) - since the beginning of the Fifth Republic in 1958, lost a presidential election for the first time in 1974. It won Valéry Giscard d'Estaing , who belonged to the bourgeois camp, but not to the UDR, but to the liberal-conservative Républicains indépendants (RI). However, Giscard d'Estaing also included the UDR in his government and appointed the Gaullist Jacques Chirac as Prime Minister . In August 1976, however, he was replaced by the non-party Raymond Barre . Chirac saw the need for a renewal of the Gaullist movement and founded the RPR on December 5, 1976, of which he became first chairman. The following year, Jacques Chirac was elected mayor of the capital Paris .

In the French parliamentary elections in 1978 - as in most of the elections that followed - the RPR entered into an alliance with the Union pour la démocratie française (UDF) of Giscard d'Estaing's supporters: the Majorité presidentialielle , that of the President's government a majority in parliament should secure. The RPR won 22.62% of the vote, 150 out of 490 seats. The RPR faction was not as strong as the UDR before, but it was still the strongest force in the National Assembly. Together, RPR and UDF continued to have a majority.

The RPR differed from the UDF primarily in questions of political style and organizational form: The UDF relied more on “ notables ” that were rooted in the municipalities and regions; the RPR, however, wanted to be a mass party with a nationwide active base. In addition, in its early phase the RPR pursued a more dirigistic economic policy (in contrast to the more economically liberal UDF), a more authoritarian domestic policy and was rather skeptical of European integration . In both parliamentary and presidential elections, however, both parties usually reached agreements, no later than the second ballot, in order to prevent left-wing candidates from winning. In the 1979 elections to the European Parliament, the RPR received 16.31% of the vote (15 out of 81 seats). Your MEPs sat in the Group of European Progressive Democrats , together with the European MEPs from the Irish Fianna Fáil .

Opposition and cohabitation during the Mitterrand presidency

RPR party congress in Toulouse 1982

On April 26, 1981, Chirac received 18% of the vote in the first round of the presidential election . In the second ballot, the RPR supported the incumbent Giscard d'Estaing (UDF), who was defeated by the socialist François Mitterrand . In the parliamentary elections that followed shortly afterwards , the RPR received 20.81% of the vote (85 of 491 seats). Subsequently, the RPR was in opposition to the first left government of the Fifth Republic. During this time the program and ideology of the party changed. She turned away from de Gaulle's dirigistic economic policy as well as from the eurosceptic course and turned to neoliberal program items such as privatization, deregulation and tax cuts. However, there was resistance to this change from “orthodox” and “social Gaullists”. In 1984 the RPR achieved 43% of the votes (41 out of 81 seats) in a joint list with the UDF in the 1984 European elections .

For the French parliamentary elections in 1986, the RPR put together candidates with the UDF in most constituencies, but in some constituencies, RPR candidates ran separately. The joint election program with the UDF confirmed the pro-European and neoliberal turn of the RPR. The joint UDF / RPR candidacies received 21.4% of the vote (147 out of 573 seats) and the separate RPR nominations received 11.2% (76 seats). Together with the UDF, which had achieved another 53 seats for its own candidates, and smaller right-wing parties, the RPR was able to form a government coalition. Jacques Chirac became Prime Minister under President François Mitterrand, which marked the beginning of the first cohabitation . This constellation contradicted de Gaulle's idea of ​​a strong president as head of state and government and was therefore rejected by "orthodox Gaullists". In the regional elections held at the same time as the parliamentary elections, the RPR won the presidency in 6 of 22 regions, and the allied UDF provided the president in 14 other regions. Chirac campaigned in December 1986 for the adoption of the Single European Act , a departure from the national veto right in the EC Council, for which de Gaulle had advocated vehemently 21 years earlier.

On April 25, 1988 Jacques Chirac received 19.95% of the vote in the first round of the presidential election and reached the runoff election. In this he was defeated by the incumbent President François Mitterrand with 45.98% of the vote. As usual, the RPR-led government resigned after the presidential election. Mitterrand appointed the socialist Michel Rocard Prime Minister and dissolved the National Assembly prematurely. In the following parliamentary elections , the cooperation between the RPR and the UDF intensified: Already in the first ballot, only one bourgeois candidate from the Union du Rassemblement et du Center , ie the RPR or the UDF , ran in almost all constituencies . The RPR candidates received 19.18% of the vote in the first ballot and 127 of the 575 seats, leaving it in the opposition.

With the election defeats in 1988, disputes over direction began in the party, which had been dominated by Chirac until then. On June 21, 1988, the Chirac confidante Bernard Pons was elected group chairman in the National Assembly with only one vote against Philippe Séguin . A group of around forty-year-olds, the so-called Quadras , denounced the alleged slide of the RPR to the right, which was seen, among other things, in electoral agreements with the Front National in the parliamentary elections in 1988. In the elections to the European Parliament in 1989 , the joint list of RPR and UDF won 28.9% of the vote and 26 out of 81 seats. On January 11, 1990, Charles Pasqua and Philippe Séguin published a program text for the upcoming election of the party leadership under the title Rassemblement pour la France , in which they represented a position of sovereignty . The opposing position in the spirit of Chirac was drafted by Alain Juppé , whose text received a majority a few weeks later at the party congress in Le Bourget . Chirac remained chairman of the RPR. At the end of 1990, Michel Noir , Michèle Barzach and Alain Carignon left the party.

In 1990, RPR and UDF founded the alliance Union pour la France (UPF; German “Union for France”) with a joint program to replace the left government. In the 1992 regional elections, the UPF won 32.9% of the vote and the presidency in 19 of 22 regions. In the same year Jacques Chirac defended the “yes” vote in the referendum on the EU Treaty of Maastricht ; Charles Pasqua and Philippe Séguin defended their “no”. In the referendum, around two thirds of the RPR voters voted against the treaty, but overall the yes camp narrowly prevailed. A year later (1993) the UPF considered letting the UDF and RPR regain their independence.

Édouard Balladur - Prime Minister and presidential candidate

The 1993 elections to the National Assembly resulted in a landslide victory for the bourgeois parties. RPR candidates received 19.83% of the vote in the first ballot and 242 out of 577 seats. Together with the UDF (213 seats), the Union pour la France achieved an overwhelming majority in the National Assembly of more than four fifths of the seats. As a result, Édouard Balladur (RPR) was appointed Prime Minister and the second cohabitation began. The appointment of Balladur was preceded by an agreement between the latter and Chirac, according to which Chirac renounced the position of prime minister, Balladur should refrain from running for the next presidential election. In 1994 Alain Juppé was elected chairman of the party. In the European Parliament elections in the same year, the joint list of RPR and UDF won 25.7% of the vote and 28 out of 81 seats.

Chirac presidency

In the run-up to the 1995 presidential election , Balladur decided, contrary to the agreement made with Chirac, to run as a presidential candidate, supported by the UDF. As a result, two RPR members competed against each other in the first ballot, with Chirac promoting traditional Gaullist values ​​during the election campaign. He denounced the "social divide" and promised to make the fight against unemployment a top priority, regardless of the pressures of globalization and EU commitments. Chirac reached the runoff election with 20.84%, while Édouard Balladur only came third with 18.58%. In the second ballot, Chirac was elected President of the Republic with 52.64% against 47.36% for Lionel Jospin (PS). After the presidential election, the Balladur government resigned as usual, and Chirac appointed Alain Juppé as the new Prime Minister. A few months after the election, Chirac initiated measures to comply with the EU convergence criteria despite his campaign rhetoric .

The dual candidacy in 1995 caused a deep and long-lasting rift within the Gaullist camp, in which Chirac himself and his followers (including Dominique de Villepin and Alain Juppé ) stood against Balladur's followers (including Nicolas Sarkozy and François Fillon ). This conflict shaped the presidency of Chirac, especially in his second term, and also that of Nicolas Sarkozy. On the other hand, the dividing lines between RPR and UDF were becoming increasingly blurred. Both Chirac and Balladur had supporters in both parties. In the UDF as in the RPR there were pro-European supporters of the free market (e.g. Alain Madelin in the UDF, Sarkozy in the RPR) who had more in common with each other than with a Jacobin Gaullist like Philippe Séguin (RPR) or one for Center-trending Christian Democrats like François Bayrou (UDF).

In the early elections to the National Assembly in 1997 , the RPR and UDF suffered an unexpected defeat against the united left of the gauche plurielle . The RPR itself received 15.7% of the vote in the first round of voting and won 139 of 577 seats. Alain Juppé had to hand over the office of Prime Minister to Lionel Jospin (PS), which started the third cohabitation of the Fifth Republic - this time with reversed roles. As a result of the electoral defeat, Philippe Séguin, supported by Balladur's circle, succeeded Alain Juppés as party leader of the RPR in 1997. In the regional elections in March 1998, the UDF and RPR together received 27.9% of the vote (another 2.3% for separate RPR candidacies). RPR candidates assumed presidencies in 3 out of 22 regions ( Brittany , Champagne-Ardenne , Pays de la Loire ). The party lost significantly to the 1992 regional election.

In September 1998, Séguin was confirmed in a primary election of party members. A few months later, he gave up the post after the conflict with Jacques Chirac over the course of the RPR had escalated. Nicolas Sarkozy, previously Secretary General, took over the interim chairmanship of the RPR. In the European elections in 1999 , the RPR suffered a dramatic defeat: the joint list with the UDF spin-off Démocratie Libérale (DL) with the top candidate Nicolas Sarkozy received only 12.82% of the vote and 12 of 81 seats. In the bourgeois camp, it was only the second strongest force behind the Eurosceptic Rassemblement pour la France (RPF) list carried by Philippe de Villiers and RPR member Charles Pasqua . The Union for Europe parliamentary group , which consisted mainly of MEPs from the RPR (and those from Forza Italia ), disbanded after the election. Instead, the representatives of the RPR and the UDF joined the large center-right EPP-ED group and thus became partners of the German Union parties and the British Tories . The departure of the EU-skeptical “sovereignists” from the RPR further contributed to the rapprochement of Gaullist and non-Gaullist moderate rights in France. The political concept of Gaullism no longer played a significant role at the turn of the millennium.

The last RPR chairman Michèle Alliot-Marie

In the primary election for party chairmanship, four candidates applied, with Jean-Paul Delevoye and Michèle Alliot-Marie qualifying for the runoff election. Alliot-Marie finally prevailed with 62.7%. In the local elections in March 2001, the RPR lost the Paris City Hall to Bertrand Delanoë (PS). The Gaullist party had held this post since the re-establishment of the office of Mayor of Paris in 1977, first with Jacques Chirac (until his election as president in 1995), then with Jean Tiberi . Due to various affairs, the RPR had not put this up again as a candidate for mayor, his running with his own list against the RPR candidate Philippe Séguin caused the defeat.

Merging into the UMP

Around the year 2000, the RPR and UDF considered creating a unity party from the various parties of the parliamentary right in order to prepare for the parliamentary and presidential elections of 2002 and thus to unite the Gaullist, liberal and Christian Democratic currents. The Alliance, which was initiated in 1998 by the then party leaders Philippe Séguin (RPR) and François Léotard (UDF), was stillborn because it opposed the incumbent president and his supporters. The Union en mouvement (UEM), founded in April 2001 - with the UDF politician Renaud Dutreil as chairman and Hervé Gaymard (RPR) as general secretary - however, had the sympathy of Chirac. Most of the leading party representatives declared on the occasion of the 25th anniversary of the RPR in December 2001 that they wanted to hold onto their previous party.

In February 2002 the Union en mouvement was restarted , not as a unified party, but as an alliance to support Chirac in the presidential election on April 21, 2002 , this time with broad support from the RPR, Démocratie Libérale and parts of the UDF . Nevertheless, the incumbent achieved only 19.88% of the votes in the first ballot, but reached the runoff election as the leader, in which Jean-Marie Le Pen from the right-wing extremist Front national , who was just ahead of Lionel Jospin, surprisingly moved in as second . The shock in France over the election result also led to the UEM being transformed into the Union pour la majorité présidentielle (UMP; "Union for the majority of the President") three days later - with the participation of RPR, DL and large parts of the UDF whose immediate aim was to support Chirac as a candidate in the runoff for the presidency. Chirac won this in the second ballot with 82.21% against 17.79% for Jean-Marie Le Pen. In the subsequent parliamentary elections in June 2002 , the RPR no longer ran independently, but as part of the UMP alliance. This was unreasonable for RPR traditionalists - especially since Prime Minister and top candidate Jean-Pierre Raffarin was not a Gaullist but a DL member - but it paid off: The UMP won 33.3% of the votes in the first ballot and 365 out of 577 seats , far more than the RPR had ever achieved.

At an extraordinary party congress on September 21, 2002 in Villepinte , the party members decided to dissolve the RPR and integrate it into the UMP, which was converted from the party alliance into a party. The Démocratie Libérale under the failed presidential candidate Alain Madelin also disbanded in favor of the UMP. In addition, numerous UDF politicians converted, the Parti radical valoisien became an associated party of the UMP. Shortly thereafter, it was renamed Union pour un mouvement populaire . Unlike the RPR previously, the UMP no longer had a clearly Gaullist identity, but was a broad, center-right collecting party, modeled on the German CDU / CSU and the European People's Party .

Election results

Parliamentary elections

choice Ballot be right percent Seats list fraction
1978 1st ballot 6,462,462 22.62 150 of 488 RPR 154 of 491
2nd ballot 6,651,756 26.11
1981 1st ballot 5,231,269 20.81 85 of 491 RPR 88 of 491
2nd ballot 4,174,302 22.35
1986 / 6.008.612 21.44 73 of 573 (RPR)
74 of 573 (UDF) 		RPR + UDF 155 of 577 (RPR, without UDF)
3,143,224 11.22 76 of 573 RPR
1988 1st ballot 4,687,047 19.19 126 of 575 RPR 130 of 577
2nd ballot 4,688,493 23.09
1993 1st ballot
2nd ballot
1997 1st ballot 3,983,257 15.65 139 of 577 RPR 140 of 577
2nd ballot 5,714,354 22.46

European Parliament

  • 1979: 16.31% - 15 out of 81 seats
  • 1984: 43% - 41 of 81 seats (joint list with UDF)
  • 1989: 28.90% - 26 of 81 seats (joint list with UDF)
  • 1994: 25.70% - 28 of 81 seats (joint list with UDF)
  • 1999: 12.82% - 12 of 81 seats (shared list with DL)

Presidential election

  • 1981 (1st ballot): 18% Jacques Chirac
  • 1988 (1st ballot): 19.95% Jacques Chirac
  • 1988 (2nd ballot): 45.98% Jacques Chirac
  • 1995 (1st ballot): 20.04% Jacques Chirac
  • 1995 (1st ballot): 18.58% Édouard Balladur
  • 1995 (2nd ballot): 52.64% Jacques Chirac
  • 2002 (1st ballot): 19.88% Jacques Chirac
  • 2002 (2nd ballot): 82.21% Jacques Chirac (UMP)

Regional elections

  • 1986: Presidency in 6 of 22 regions
  • 1992: 32.90% - Presidency in 19 of 22 regions (UPF)
  • 1998: 28.23% - Presidency in 3 of 22 regions (joint list with UDF)

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Andrew Knapp: From the Gaullist movement to the president's party. In: Jocelyn AJ Evans: The French party system. Manchester University Press, Manchester 2003, pp. 121-136, at p. 122.
  2. ^ Andrew Knapp: From the Gaullist movement to the president's party. In: Jocelyn AJ Evans: The French party system. Manchester University Press, Manchester 2003, pp. 121-136, at p. 123.
  3. ↑ a b c d e f Andrew Knapp: From the Gaullist movement to the president's party. In: Jocelyn AJ Evans: The French party system. Manchester University Press, Manchester 2003, pp. 121-136, at p. 125.
  4. ^ Andrew Knapp: From the Gaullist movement to the president's party. In: Jocelyn AJ Evans: The French party system. Manchester University Press, Manchester 2003, pp. 121-136, at p. 124.
  5. ^ Andrew Knapp: From the Gaullist movement to the president's party. In: Jocelyn AJ Evans: The French party system. Manchester University Press, Manchester 2003, pp. 121-136, at p. 129.
  6. ^ A b Andrew Knapp: From the Gaullist movement to the president's party. In: Jocelyn AJ Evans: The French party system. Manchester University Press, Manchester 2003, pp. 121-136, at p. 126.
  7. ^ Andrew Knapp: From the Gaullist movement to the president's party. In: Jocelyn AJ Evans: The French party system. Manchester University Press, Manchester 2003, pp. 121-136, at p. 130.
  8. ^ Andrew Knapp: From the Gaullist movement to the president's party. In: Jocelyn AJ Evans: The French party system. Manchester University Press, Manchester 2003, pp. 121-136, at p. 132.
  9. ^ A b c Andrew Knapp: From the Gaullist movement to the president's party. In: Jocelyn AJ Evans: The French party system. Manchester University Press, Manchester 2003, pp. 121-136, at p. 133.

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