AFP/Paris
Members of former president Nicolas Sarkozy’s UMP have slammed his ideological lurch towards the far-right in a bid to catch votes the day after the party lost a parliamentary election.Former prime minister Jean-Pierre Raffarin, who represents the UMP’s centre, said “the drift to the right has failed” after the party and its allies won only 229 out of 577 seats, after dominating parliament for 10 years.Sarkozy, president from 2007 until Socialist Francois Hollande beat him in May, was the driving force behind the UMP’s sharp turn right which began with a now infamous 2010 speech in Grenoble linking immigration and insecurity.His presidency went on to clamp down on minorities and began fruitless debates about French identity in a bid to draw voters away from the rising anti-immigrant, anti-EU far-right National Front (FN) party.To the dismay of some within the UMP, Sarkozy’s presidential campaign then swung ever further right, targeting Islam and immigration, after FN leader Marine Le Pen scored almost 18% in the first-round vote.But Sarkozy’s defeat in the May 6 presidential run-off with 48.4% of votes was not as thumping as some had predicted and right-wing voices within the UMP, including party leader Jean-Francois Cope, were undaunted.Between the two rounds of the parliamentary vote, the UMP abandoned the established “Republican Front” principle by which UMP or Socialist candidates would stand down if it meant ensuring defeat for an FN candidate.The FN then got two MPs into parliament for the first time since 1998, with the UMP’s right wing, known as the “Popular Right”, openly expressing “convergence” with FN values.Former foreign minister Alain Juppe said the UMP’s ideology was unclear “when you hear some of our friends saying they identify with the values of the National Front”.Former finance minister Francois Baroin lamented: “When I heard between the parliamentary election’s two rounds some people say they shared National Front values and even that they find Marine Le Pen agreeable, what’s the next step?”Nevertheless many icons of the UMP’s right lost their election battles, including former ministers Claude Gueant and Nadine Morano.While FN voters obeyed their party leader’s instruction to abstain from the second round if no FN candidate was standing, many FN candidates were helped by right-wingers who had no UMP candidate to vote for in the run-off.“The UMP is going to have to take this into account, or they’re going to go from failure to failure,” Le Pen gloated.With the UMP divided over which way to go in opposition – and how to get back into power – a party leadership battle is set for November.The fight will pit UMP chief Cope against Sarkozy’s prime minister Francois Fillon, with Juppe a possible outsider.“We must renew ourselves,” Fillon said on Sunday, having already claimed before the parliamentary election but after Sarkozy’s defeat that the UMP “no longer has a natural leader”.