Could France’s conservatives really work with Le Pen? It’s no longer unthinkable.

PARIS — France’s conservatives last year considered the idea of an alliance with Marine Le Pen’s far-right National Rally so toxic that when then-party leader Eric Ciotti suggested it, the furious backlash forced him to physically barricade himself in his office to pretend he was still in his job. 

Ciotti and his allies ultimately had to splinter off from Les Républicains — the storied party of Charles de Gaulle and Jacques Chirac — to form their own faction allied to the National Rally.

But fast forward 18 months from Ciotti’s farcical performance in summer 2024, and a union spanning the entirety of the French political right — including the National Rally — is no longer implausible ahead of the 2027 presidential election. The idea even has a widely discussed name: l’union des droites, the union on the right.

Former conservative President Nicolas Sarkozy catalyzed the political debate this month when he said the right needed to join forces ahead of the vote to ensure it takes the Élysée Palace.

Writing from behind bars after being convicted in a case relating to the financing of his 2007 campaign, Sarkozy called for the “broadest possible spirit of unity” on the right in his recently published prison memoir. Then when asked about the comment at a book signing, he was far less ambiguous: “We won’t succeed if there’s no union.”

Sarkozy’s statements rattled conservative heavyweights. Could the political heirs of France’s most revered World War II hero, de Gaulle, really partner with a party whose founders included Nazi sympathizers? 

The traditional answer has always been a defiant “non.” After failing to reach the second round of the historic presidential election between Le Pen and Emmanuel Macron in 2017, the Les Républicains scion François Fillon immediately told the French to vote against a party long defined by violence and intolerance.

For many, that is still the official party line. Valérie Pécresse, the party’s 2022 presidential candidate, said no to a union in multiple interviews with French media. Jean-François Copé, a minister during Chirac’s presidency, criticized Sarkozy for betraying de Gaulle’s principles by throwing his support behind the National Rally’s inexperienced 30-year-old president, Jordan Bardella, because he is doing well in the polls.

“It is an extremely risky choice,” Copé told POLITICO.

But behind closed doors, and increasingly in public, conservative bigwigs are acknowledging the possibility is real. Fewer and fewer of them are opposing the move on principle. Crucially, Sarkozy is not being ostracized by Les Républicains as Ciotti was for the suggestion of a partnership.

Many conservatives are more worried that their party is simply collapsing as France’s center crumbles. Too weak to stand alone, the party’s top brass increasingly sense they will only win powerful jobs in the next cabinet if they tie their fortunes to the far right, which heads the polls running into the 2027 presidential race.

Xavier Bertrand, the conservative leader of the northern region of Hauts-de-France said Sarkozy had, with his suggestion, “hammered the final nail into the coffin of Les Républicains.” 

One former leader of Les Républicains put it even more bluntly in remarks to POLITICO, saying his party was “finished.” 

Looking for love 

Sarkozy used to privately mock the National Rally’s Bardella as so lacking in experience that he “hasn’t even been president of a ping-pong club,” according to one of the former French leader’s most loyal supporters.

So why the change of heart?  

No conservative power players interviewed by POLITICO, many of whom were granted anonymity to speak candidly, believed Sarkozy’s shift was motivated by his beliefs. 

Some thought Sarkozy was seeking revenge against Macron. In his prison memoir, Sarkozy said he was angry with him for not intervening when he was stripped of his Légion d’honneur over his corruption conviction.

Others believe Sarkozy is gunning for a pardon and betting that a National Rally president will grant it, given Le Pen’s embezzlement conviction that she continues to frame as politically motivated.  

Sarkozy’s loyal supporter previously quoted played armchair psychologist, saying the former French leader is, despite his tough-talking persona, a sensitive soul who responds to those who are nice to him — and Bardella publicly spoke positively of Sarkozy in the months leading up to a meeting over the summer. 

“He’s looking for love; that’s what his whole life has been about,” a party strategist from Les Républicains concurred. 

Far right, center stage 

For decades in France, any whiff of a partnership with the party then known as the National Front was met with furor.

Even small-town alliances were enough to provoke nationwide outrage. A country haunted by its history of Nazi collaboration wasn’t going to accept candidates working with Jean-Marie Le Pen, the National Front founder infamous for belittling the significance of the Holocaust.  

But the elder Le Pen is dead. His daughter and political heir rebranded the party as the National Rally and has, in little more than a decade, dragged it from the fringes of French politics to the top of most opinion polls.

The National Rally now has more seats in the National Assembly, France’s more powerful lower house of parliament, than any other single political party. Its popularity has pushed Les Républicains further to the political right, to the point that many believe the only thing separating the two is their position on the economy.

Even here, Bardella’s emergence as the likely presidential candidate makes the National Rally a more acceptable partner for Les Républicains. Mainstream conservative business leaders long saw the far right as brutish economic illiterates, but the polished Bardella is engaging in active outreach to the captains of industry. Skeptics like Copé, the former Chirac minister, however, still see Bardella as an outlier when it comes to the National Rally’s economic platform.

Perhaps most critically, polling shows that a majority of French voters on the right of the political spectrum now favor a union of right-wing parties. A survey conducted for French radio station RTL and published Dec. 10 found that two-thirds of right-leaning respondents were in favor of an electoral pact between the National Rally and Les Républicains.

Municipal elections in March are shaping up to be a key test of tolerance for this kind of right-wing union.  

Already in the city of Dijon, the center-right candidate running for mayor is under fire for not sufficiently condemning Eric Zemmour’s anti-immigrant party Reconquest after it endorsed him. Murmurs of an alliance in Marseille are also growing louder given that polling shows the National Rally and Les Républicains candidates there would likely split support on the right and clear the way for Socialist Mayor Benoît Payan’s reelection.  

The Sarkozy supporter quoted earlier saw March as the key Rubicon for how far the right would cooperate.

“There’s going to be a complete shakeup at the municipals” they said.