The
race to lead the French Right in next year’s presidential election risked
descending into acrimony on Wednesday over allegations that Nicolas
Sarkozy has fiddled
the expatriate vote ahead of party primaries.
The allegations came as
the dates for next year’s presidential election were announced as April 23 and
May 7.
Rivals of Mr Sarkozy, the
former French president and current leader of The Republicans, France’s
mainstream conservative party, saw red after discovering that he discreetly
changed the rules on how French expats can vote while his opponents were
away.
Polls suggest that the
roughly 1.2 million French nationals living abroad are even less inclined
to vote for Mr Sarkozy in party primaries on November 20 and 27 than those
in mainland France, where the latest survey suggested that Alain Juppé, Mr
Sarkozy’s main rival, would beat him by 17 points.
Candidates previously agreed
that French expats would be allowed to vote electronically. But on Tuesday
night, Mr Sarkozy proposed that they should only be able to vote on paper,
saying “I don’t see why a guy from the Somme has to come 40 kilometres to vote
while for a ‘golden boy’ it should be easier.”
In the
absence of rivals, including Mr Juppé, his ex-prime minister François Fillon,
former party leader Jean-François Copé and Bruno Lemaire, the motion was passed
without resistance.
“Not allowing expatriates
to vote via Internet is tantamount to excluding them from the primary because a
paper vote is technically and legally impossible for them,” said Thierry
Mariani, MP for the French abroad and a Fillon supporter.
Frédéric Lefebvre, another MP
for expatriates and a primary candidate called the move a “denial of
democracy”.
“We fixed the rules, they must
be applied,” said Gilles Boyer, Mr Juppé’s campaign director. “We cannot accept
that with one stroke of the pen, two million French are deprived of a vote.”
The rivals complained
to The Republicans’ independent electoral watchdog, which on
Wednesday said it “contested” scrapping the electronic vote because
the party didn’t have the “means” to organise a paper one abroad.
The spat has sparked fresh
concerns that the French Right could descend into bitter feuding, as it
did in 2012 when the race to elect a new leader ended in fiasco amid mutual
accusations of vote-rigging.
Mr Sarkozy later took over as
party leader on the proviso that the other chief figures, such as Mr Juppé and
Mr Fillon, could keep checks on decision-making to avoid it turning into his
private electoral machine.
One in four French say they could participate in the
upcoming primaries, whose winner stands a very high chance of being elected the
country’s next president, according to a string of polls.
An Odoxa-Dentsu poll this week
suggested that Mr Juppé would win the first round, notching up 41 per cent of
the vote, way ahead of Mr Sarkozy, on 24 per cent, and with Mr Le Maire, a
former agriculture minister, third on 15 per cent. Mr Juppé would beat any
rival in the run-off, the poll predicted.
Mr Sarkozy has failed to claw
back support from Right-wing sympathisers since being
placed under formal investigation for illegal funding of his 2012 re-election
campaign.
However, he was mobbed by
vocal admirers at recent signing sessions in provincial supermarkets of his new book, France for
Life, which has sold 180,000 copies, suggesting parts of the country
at least still supports the ex-leader.
Thierry Solère, an MP backing
one his rivals, warned: “If you think that Nicolas is dead, I advise you to cut
him up into little pieces and bury them in every continent, because even so,
he’ll be back.”
Currently, François Hollande,
the incumbent Socialist president, whose approval rating has now slumped to
just 13 per cent – a record low for any French head of state - stands no chance
of reaching round two of next year’s presidential race, according to several
polls. As things stand, round two will see a face-off between a Right-wing
candidate and Marine Le Pen, leader of the far-Right Front National.
Despite this, Mr Hollande
issued a combative defence of his record this week at a meeting in a Paris
theatre on “the Left and power”, in what commentators said appeared to be the
starting gun for his re-election campaign.
He is hoping for an
upswing amid timid signs that record unemployment may be finally on
the wane and that growth is slightly higher than expected.
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