AFP/Paris
Hopes for a ceasefire in the battle within France’s right-wing opposition UMP were dashed yesterday as party chief Jean-Francois Cope rejected plans for a referendum on a new leadership vote.
The interminable struggle - which has forced ex-president Nicolas Sarkozy to intervene - looked set to continue after lawmakers loyal to ex-premier Francois Fillon formally broke away from the UMP’s parliamentary wing.
The UMP, the political heir to the movement founded by Charles de Gaulle after World War II, has been on the verge of collapse over the dispute, which saw a November 18 leadership vote tarnished by accusations of vote-rigging.
The rival camps appeared to have reached a breakthrough late on Tuesday when they agreed to a snap party referendum on whether to hold a new leadership vote.  But Cope backed away yesterday, saying that Fillon had crossed the line by forming a splinter parliamentary group. “The red line has been crossed and I am drawing the conclusions from that,” Cope said, denouncing the “lamentable spectacle we are offering the French.”
Fillon’s group, dubbed the Rally for the UMP, filed formal documents splitting from the rest of the party late on Tuesday, with 68 of the 194 UMP-affiliated deputies in the lower house National Assembly signing up.
The dissidents decided they would remain financially attached to the UMP so as not to deprive it of parliamentary public funding, but Fillon insisted the bloc would not re-join the rest of the party until a deal on a new leadership vote is reached.
A party appeals commission on Monday confirmed Cope’s win in the election, raising his margin of victory from 98 votes to nearly 1,000 following an examination of complaints over alleged irregularities. Fillon’s camp has accused the commission of bias and said he will pursue legal action including a civil suit to have the results overturned.
Both Fillon, 58, and Cope, 48, are fiscal conservatives advocating free-market policies and economic reforms, but Cope has carved out a niche on the right of the UMP with his tough-talking approach to immigration and Islam.
After staying out of the dispute last week, Sarkozy stepped in on Monday, meeting with the two rivals and reportedly pushing the referendum plan.
Sarkozy is anxious to maintain the UMP - a decade-old coalition of Gaullist conservatives, centrists, Christian democrats and liberals - in case he decides to make a comeback bid for the presidency in 2017.
Though defeated after a single term by Socialist Francois Hollande in May’s presidential vote, the charismatic Sarkozy, 57, remains popular with party rank-and-file and many expect he will return to politics.
The ridicule foisted on the party over the leadership debacle has done serious damage to the UMP’s image and has been a windfall for Hollande as he struggles with a flat economy and falling popularity.
The Socialists have been careful not to openly gloat about the crisis, but government spokeswoman Najat Vallaud-Belkacem raised concerns about the impact it was having on the public’s opinion of politicians.
The dispute “is distressing, worrying for democracy, because we all know as politicians that we have to suffer from a bad image given to us by some, even if they do not belong to our political group,” she said.
Former UMP justice minister Rachida Dati, a Cope supporter, urged party dissidents to give up their battle for the leadership. “It is time to say ‘Stop!’ to the irresponsible kamikazes who are acting in their personal interest by using party activists as a pretext to deny their failure,” she said in a statement.