PARIS — François Baroin, France’s wavy-haired former finance minister, had a plan to restore Gaullist pride and set himself up as a potential president in 2022.
Then reality got in the way.
Bitterly divided, cowed by a wave of support for President Emmanuel Macron, disdainful of their leader, Baroin’s Les Républicains (LR) are heading into parliamentary elections this Sunday with all the enthusiasm of a prisoner being led to a firing squad.
It’s easy to see why. A protégé of former presidents Jacques Chirac and Nicolas Sarkozy, Baroin thought that by now he would be dictating terms to Macron as master of a powerful conservative bloc in parliament. Five years from now, he could be running for president.
Instead, with polls showing Macron on course to win a landslide and absolute majority, he is looking at five years of hard graft trying to discipline a weak and divided minority.
Potential president? Not so much.
“I’m like a prisoner who is counting the days until I can walk free” — François Baroin
“I’m like a prisoner who is counting the days until I can walk free,” Baroin said last week, according to Le Canard Enchainé, a satirical and investigative weekly.
Or: “We [France’s conservatives] are damned down to the 13th generation,” he said in another aside reported by the JDD.
Dreams smashed
It wasn’t meant to be this way.
A month ago, Baroin and his allies were full of hope and fervor. In a country that, according to cliché, leans conservative, former Prime Minister François Fillon’s failure to win election as president was an aberration, they argued.
The scandal-tainted Fillon had only himself to blame for turning away hundreds of thousands of conservative voters who could not bring themselves to back him. But, Baroin and others believed, those conservatives would return to the polls in June to give Les Républicains control of parliament.
It was a chance to lead conservatives back to glory, and potentially become prime minister if the party won a majority. Baroin signaled to Macron in April that he was “available” for the job, should the future president be thinking about it.
In this regard, Baroin was egged on by a powerful influencer: Sarkozy, who made him finance minister.
“Baroin would not have accepted the job [of leading Les Républicains in the parliamentary elections] unless Sarkozy told him it would be good for him,” said a senior member of the party who is familiar with Baroin’s discussions with the former president. “He told him [Baroin] that Macron would fall short in the legislative [elections] and that he had a good chance of becoming prime minister,” added the source.
Baroin had reason to hope.
Républicains chieftains predicted a collapse in support for Macron after the election, arguing that he was elected by default against Marine Le Pen. Feeding off their confidence, Baroin dictated ultra-tough terms to his troops heading into battle. “Anyone who gets close to Macron before the legislative elections will be excluded,” he told RTL radio.
Hubris punished
The hard line turned out to be disastrous.
First, Macron called Baroin’s bluff by recruiting three conservatives into his government, including his prime minister and economy minister. Both Juppé loyalists, Edouard Philippe and Bruno Le Maire, showed they were willing to turn their back on the party for a chance to rule.
Then Macron went after conservatives with a liberal message on the economy that could be summed up as, “We agree on what needs to be done, so why not give me a chance?”
Républicains heavyweights were ready to help. Former Prime Minister Jean-Pierre Raffarin said he wanted to “help Macron succeed.” Juppé told journalists in Bordeaux that he was not in a state of mind where he wanted to be “systematically opposed, nor in frontal opposition” to Macron’s government. Juppé doubled down on his stance by endorsing a former backer who had jumped ship to Macron’s side, Aurore Bergé.
Alain Juppé | Guillaume Souvant/AFP via Getty Images
Meanwhile, Les Républicains was breaking up. Former Sarkozy speechwriter Henri Guaino went off to run an independent campaign. Hardliner Laurent Wauquiez was pushing back against Baroin’s attempt to soften the party’s platform.
Baroin tried to adapt by being less adamantly anti-Macron. It was too late. By then, polls were showing a clear victory for Macron, with the conservatives on course to win some 120 seats.
The eternal potential
With voting a day away, Baroin is in a corner.
If his party is too weak to weigh on Macron, internal divisions will deepen. While moderates will want to cooperate with the president, hardliners are set to radicalize into a hard-right force that goes after the president on his blind spots: identity politics, the role of political Islam in society, crime and punishment, and criticism of Brussels and Berlin.
The problem for Baroin: He’s not cut out for leading the hard-right faction.
That role is better designed for Les Républicains’ Vice-President Wauquiez, who proclaimed in 2011 that welfare benefits were a “cancer” for France — a position that won him applause from Marion Maréchal-Le Pen, far-right leader Marine Le Pen’s popular niece.
Wauquiez is positioning himself to become chief of a new, post-Gaullist right in France, one increasingly compatible with Le Pen’s National Front. Baroin will try to survive between the hardliners and Macron survivors.
There is still hope for him.
Then again, there always was.
