The EconomistJune 29th 2019 Europe 29T
wenty yearsago an ambitious politi-
cian led the French centre-right into
European Parliament elections and was
humiliated. The 12.8% secured by the
young Nicolas Sarkozy was so dismal that
the party dispatched him into the political
wilderness (he later staged a comeback and
won the presidency). Today, however, the
party has done even worse than it did in
- After scoring a pitiful 8.5% in May’s
European elections, the very survival of the
once-mighty Republicans is in the balance.
The French centre-right is partly hos-
tage to broader Europe-wide voting shifts
towards nationalists, centrists and greens.
But the Republicans, who failed to make it
into the presidential run-off in 2017 for the
first time under the Fifth Republic, thought
they had a solution. The party picked Fran-
çois-Xavier Bellamy, a philosophy teacher
from Versailles, to lead its European cam-
paign and tilt to the conservative right.
Having already lost its leading moderates
to President Emmanuel Macron’s centrist
government—in the shape of the current
prime minister, Edouard Philippe, and the
finance minister, Bruno Le Maire—the
party hoped to build a base on the cultural
values of the traditional right.
To this end Mr Bellamy, with the clean-
cut looks of a choirboy, was an apt choice.
He promised to write “Europe’s Judeo-
Christian roots” into European Union trea-
ties, and beat back immigration. Opposing
abortion and gay marriage, Mr Bellamy de-
clared that he was “not going to apologise”
for being who he was. The young leader,
concluded Valeurs Actuelles, a right-wing
magazine, was an “exceptional man”, ready
to defend family and country. “Bellamy:
the right is back” declared the cover of Le Fi-
garo Magazine, a conservative weekly.
Voters thought otherwise. Remarkably,
27% of those who had voted Republican in
the presidential election swung to Mr Mac-
ron’s party, while 15% opted for Marine Le
Pen’s populist National Rally (formerly the
National Front). Centre-right voters, in
other words, now find Mr Macron’s party
palatable, while traditionalists flirt with
Ms Le Pen. The Republican party is left with
those who are not liberal enough to sup-
port Mr Macron but find Ms Le Pen’s stri-
dent nationalism distasteful—and there do
not seem to be enough of them.
This is the existential problem now fac-
ing the party. In 2017 Mr Macron all but
eradicated the Socialists on the left. In 2019
he has done the same to the Republicans on
the right. The upending of party politics,
which some considered two years ago to be
a blip, has instead been entrenched. French
politics is now being played out between
Mr Macron and Ms Le Pen, as it was in the
2017 run-off. “There’s no space left between
them,” argues a former Republican now in
Mr Macron’s government, who insists that
the Republicans have “no future” at all.
Laurent Wauquiez, architect of the
failed rightward lurch, has resigned as
leader. A caretaker, Christian Jacob, looks
likely to take over. Party membership is
down to just 70,000 or so—a fifth of the fig-
ure in 2007, when Mr Sarkozy was elected
president. Many local Republican mayors,
who face re-election next year, fret that the
party is so damaged that they will lose theirjobs. Mr Macron is courting them assidu-
ously. As is Ms Le Pen, who recently
launched an “appeal” to them to join her in
an alliance instead.
Some moderates, including Valérie Pé-
cresse, president of the greater Paris re-
gion, and Xavier Bertrand, regional presi-
dent in northern France, reckon that there
is nonetheless a gap for them on the right—
but outside the Republicans. Both have
quit the party. Watching this disarray,
meanwhile, is the wily Mr Sarkozy. This
week he published “Passions”, a memoir,
keeping himself in the public eye. With a
corruption trial pending, however, Mr Sar-
kozy is unlikely to return to politics. And
the party he revived now looks set for a long
spell in the political wilderness he once
knew so well. 7PARIS
The once-mighty Republican party
looks doomed
France
Into the
wilderness
H
eaps of plasticbottlesandcontain-
ers fill bins reaching towards the
ceiling in a warehouse on Moscow’s
southern outskirts. At weekends hun-
dreds of people line up to offload careful-
ly sorted rubbish at Sobirator, a non-
profit centre, one of a handful of recy-
cling sites in the Russian capital. “For
more than 20 years, trash didn’t worry
anyone,” says Valeria Korosteleva, Sobi-
rator’s head. “We have a lot of territory, so
everything went straight to the dump.”
That may be about to change. Last
week Moscow city authorities an-nounceda plantointroduce recycling
bins in courtyards across the city by the
end of the year. For Russia this would
amount to a minor revolution: while eu
member states recover an average of 60%
of their waste, Russia recycles just 4%, a
World Bank study found in 2012. That
means that landfill has taken up the
slack. Such dumps cover some 4m hect-
ares in Russia, an area roughly the size of
Switzerland.
Yet Moscow’s leaders have hardly
undergone a green awakening. Instead,
rubbish has become a political hot pota-
to. Landfill sites around the capital are
full; Moscow plans to ship its rubbish to
the provinces. Residents of those regions
have, unsurprisingly, balked at being
treated as Moscow’s bin. “It’s about dig-
nity,” says Elena Kalinina, an activist.
The fiercest resistance has come from
Ms Kalinina’s home region of Arkhan-
gelsk. Protests have been bubbling there
since late last year, drawing thousands.
Activists have built a tent camp at the
planned landfill site in Shiyes. “The
Russian North is Not a Dump,” they
chant. Local authorities have detained
dozens of them. Activists now demand
not only an end to landfill construction
but also the resignation of the local
governor. On June 25th Russia’s Supreme
Court blocked activists’ attempt to force a
referendum on the issue.
If there is a silver lining to the gar-
bage, this is it. Just as ecology became an
outlet for civic activism in the late Soviet
era, so too have today’s rubbish pro-
blems. Moscow’s junk, in short, may be
civil society’s treasure.A recyclingrevolution?
RussiaMOSCOW
Rubbish is becoming a political problem