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France’s Conservative Party Leader Suggests Alliance With Far-Right Opposition Party

by Karen Faulkner, Worthy News Correspondent

(Worthy News) – In a controversial break with historical norms for a mainstream French political party, the leader of France’s conservative ‘Les Républicains’ has called for a nationwide alliance with the far-right anti-immigration Rassemblement National (National Rally) party, Jerusalem Post reports.

Rassemblement National has long been a major opposition party in France but, until now, it was shunned by mainstream parties wanting to distance themselves from Rally members’ outbursts of rhetoric deemed hateful toward Jews, Arabs, and Africans. While current RN leader Marine Le Pen has worked to repair her party’s antisemitic image, for example, the Rassemblement has struggled to shake off identification with the views of its founder Jean-Marie Le Pen,who has been repeatedly convicted of antisemitic hate speech.

On Sunday, however, the National Rally won a massive 30% of the vote in the European Parliamentary elections, causing sitting President Emmanuel Macron to dissolve his centrist governing coalition and call a snap election on June 30 and July 7, JPost reports.

Days after the Rally’s extraordinary victory, Eric Ciotti, president of Les Républicains said during an appearance on France’s TF1 TV channel Tuesday that his party and the National Rally have much in common. “We say the same things so let’s stop making up imagined opposition,” Ciotti said. Ciotti added that he hoped the increasingly “weak” Republicans could form a fruitful alliance with the increasingly powerful Rally.

Ciotti’s suggestion was roundly condemned by members of his own party. Olivier Marleix, the Republican party’s leader in the lower house of parliament, said on X: “Eric Ciotti only speaks for himself. He must leave the presidency of the Republicans.”