Nicolas Dupont-Aignan. Photo: flickr

On Monday, February 11, French representative and leader of the Debout La République (literally “Stand Up, Republic”) party Nicolas Dupont-Aignan spent the day in Lille, in the north of France, visiting a Romani living camp. Later, he held a public gathering in the University of Sciences Po Lille. La Jeune Politique was there.

The evening was cold in Lille, and students waited for Nicolas Dupont-Aignan to finish the briefing with his supporters. Around thirty of them, most of them over fifty, had followed their leader throughout his day in Lille, and were discussing with him their political strategy: a classic party summit. Finally, the doors opened, and slowly the students of Sciences Po Lille came in to almost completely fill the remaining two hundred seats of the amphitheatre.

It proved to be a lively political meeting, a chance for Nicolas Dupont-Aignan to explain his platform and ideologies to a room full of politics students eager to interact with and question the leader of this small right-wing party. Debout La République is the party Dupont-Aignan created when he left the UMP after the election of Nicolas Sarkozy. After a dispute with the newly elected President, he decided not to be “the nationalist conscience” of the UMP anymore.

Indeed, Dupont-Aignan advocates a curious idea for 2013: the France he dreams of is “Gaullist,” and the term, deriving from General de Gaulle, hero of World War Two and President of the Republic from 1958 to 1969, featured often in his discussion. Its use connotes a strong independence on the diplomatic scene and a fair combination of liberalism and state interventionism in economic matters. To sum it up succinctly, Dupont-Aignan dreams of the France of the post-war boom.

Even if he had been invited primarily to talk about European matters, for Nicolas Dupont-Aignan it all revolves around France. And to his great despair, such thinking is not shared by French Presidents since Valéry Giscard d’Estaing, who was elected in 1974. His voice rises when he bemoans how these Presidents had “abandoned the democratic power” to the un-elected officials, the “technocrats of Brussels;” in short, to the European Union.

His assessment of the French political scene is that it is beyond any hope. To Dupont-Aignan, President Hollande, with whom he gets along “better than Sarkozy,” is powerless, the senior civil service has “quit,” and the media has done the same. All of them have given up in the face of a globalization that has caused “not only three million unemployed, as the official statistics say, but rather five, maybe eight.” Further, France he believes has lost its capacity to effectively integrate because of uncontrolled immigration.

Sometimes, Dupont-Aignan toes the fine line that separates the republican right from the extreme right. Although he is cautious never to cross it, he willingly admits the connections between his party and the Front National party of Marine Le Pen. “She took our entire economic platform,” he claims. The problem of the FN is that it excludes people, “and you can’t win when you exclude citizens.”

Overall, however, he agrees with the FN on the European affairs. The European Union is for him a disaster and bound to fail, as it cannot reproduce what has guaranteed the stability of France: its national character. “You cannot build Europe by decree,” he said. As they are many nations within the EU, their interests are different and cannot be reconciled, which is why the euro currency will fail as well. France must then be ready for this, he urges.

After a half-hour presentation, Dupont-Aignan had to face the incisive questions of a crowd accustomed to “grilling” politicians. The atmosphere was friendly, despite the varying political backgrounds among the audience. As a savvy politician, Dupont-Aignan was able to link most of the questions to the ideas he believes in, even if sometimes this meant not answering the actual question.

It also led him down the hazardous path of rhetorical shortcuts. For example, he compared the “renouncement” of globalization on the part of the French elite to the ones of the France of Joan of Arc and of 1940. But it permitted him to raise a couple of intriguing ideas for a defendant of the nation: he supports the partnership between the two sides of the Mediterranean Sea, as well as the intervention in Mali. Meanwhile, he criticized the French reaction in favor of Al-Assad’s opponents.

Overall, it was a pleasant and stimulating evening in the amphitheatre of Sciences Po Lille. Even if Nicolas Dupont-Aignan was more convincing to his own supporters than to his contradictors, the majority of the audience had to recognize that the politician is indeed one of a kind. The incongruence between his platform and the reality of our time, and his ideological proximity with the Front de Gauche, the FN, and the UMP, makes him a unique and original individual in French politics.

Henri Guaino Photo: IBO/SIPA

Jean-François Copé and François Fillon have one more person to worry about in their race to be the President of the Union pour un Mouvement Populaire, the center-right party of Nicolas Sarkozy.

In an exclusive interview published Monday in Le Figaro, Henri Guaino, special advisor to former President Sarkozy, announced that he was indeed a candidate for the leader of the party.

Guaino said that he entered the race because there were not enough options for the UMP supports, identifying himself as a Gaullist.

“It seems that we are almost ashamed to say we are Gaullist. Well, I want us in the UMP to be proud to be Gaullist. I want to embody that pride. If I get enough support, I will be meeting with activists so that together the best way to give meaning back to that word. If we want to speak to France about “no”, the great majority of French people who want to say no to everything and especially to politics, we need to already know for ourselves what we want to embody, what values, what principles, what idea of France, of the State, of the Republic, we are referring to,” Guaino said.

Guaino was elected in the most recent legislative election as a deputy in the National Assembly, representing the 3^rd circumscription of Yvelines. In the interview he said that he did not intend to use the position as a stepping-stone for the Presidential election in 2017.

In his interview Guaino stressed that Sarkozy needed to stop being the focus of the current campaign. He said “we need to keep Nicolas Sarkozy out of all of this. That is the only way to respect him. His talent, his intelligence, his energy have allowed us not to have to answer the question of the meaning of our collective action. He responded for us. Now that he is no longer here, we cannot avoid an answer. This is the the great challenge of the next three years for the UMP. We will win or lose depending on what we represent to the eyes of the French.”

Since before Guaino entered the race, there has been an ongoing fight between the candidates regarding who will best uphold the UMP of Sarkozy. Because of this, the main campaign strategy for both candidates seems to be to draw as many similarities between the candidate and Sarkozy, and prove that the other will abandon the policies of the former President.

The former President has been busy meeting with many potential UMP leaders including his former press secretary, Nathalie Kosciusko-Morizet who is also a candidate along with Bruno Le Maire.

Just after Copé announced his official candidacy in late August, Fillon fought criticisms stemming from his comment in a Point article on August 23 in which he is quoted saying that he would bring more “serenity and pragmatism” than Sarkozy to the job. The article was all the Copé camp needed to attack Fillon for abandoning the “balance of Sarkozy.”

Fillon responded by saying “all criticism against the balance of Nicolas Sarkozy are criticisms against myself.” The former Prime Minister shot back at the Copé team without naming them, saying that “I saw that these last days certain people had discovered that there were differences between Nicolas Sarkozy and I, those who do this do not impress me because it has been five years that they have done this. It has been five years that every morning they wake up and ask themselves ‘what can we do to put a wedge between François Fillon and Nicolas Sarkozy.’ Well, they have not succeeded for 5 years and they will not succeed today.”

Guaino announced his candidacy with only 15 days left until the deadline.