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Macron’s party announces name change and centrist alliance

French President Emmanuel Macron's party has announced a name change and an alliance with two other centrist groups ahead of the parliamentary elections in June.

Published: 5 May 2022 18:29 CEST

Macron's party announces name change and centrist alliance

French centre-right party MoDem president speaks next to LREM party's head Stanislas Guerini during a press conference (Photo by STEPHANE DE SAKUTIN / AFP)

Stanislas Guerini, the delegate general of LREM (La République en marche), announced at a press conference on Thursday that LREM would be changing its name. The presidential party will now be called “Renaissance.”

During the conference in Paris, Guerini said that the new name will allow the six-year-old political party to “rebuild” and “continue expanding its political movement.” Guerini explained that the party will “always make the choice of enlightenment against obscurantism.”

This is not the first time the party has changed its name.

When it was formed as a grassroots group in 2016 it was called En marche ! (on the march), but later dropped the exclamation mark.

After Emmanuel Macron won the presidency in 2017, the party added ‘La République’ to the name, becoming La République en marche (The republic on the march) commonly shortened to LREM.

Although the party has worked hard to grow as an organisation, it is still widely considered ‘Macron’s party’ and supporters are commonly known simply as macronistes.

The latest iteration of the party comes as Macron has won a second term as president, but faces a tough battle to win a majority in the parliamentary elections in June.

The party is also facing the prospect of having to fight the 2027 election with a new candidate – in France presidents can only have two consecutive terms.

Guerini spoke at a joint press conference with Richard Ferrand, the LREM president in the French parliament, François Bayrou of the ‘MoDem’ party which currently forms a group with LREM and Edouard Philippe of the ‘Horizons’ party.

Philippe, currently mayor of Le Havre, is Macron’s former prime minister and is widely believed to be planning his own bid for the presidency in 2027. He formed the Horizons party last year, with the declared intention of consolidating the centre group in French politics.

The three announced that they will be creating a federation called “Ensemble” to bring together these three parties in preparation for the upcoming parliamentary elections.

The announcement comes after the four major leftist parties (the far-left La France Insoumise, the Greens, the centre-left Parti Socialiste and the Communists) their own alliance in order to fight the parliamentary elections.

OPINION France’s left alliance is an optical illusion and will not win

The centrist alliance essentially consolidates votes in the parliamentary elections into ‘blocks’ of leftist of centrist voters. The right – far-right Rassemblement National under Marine Le Pen, centre-right Les Républicains and Eric Zemmour’s extreme right block – has no agreement.

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Azerbaijan vehemently rejects the accusation it bears responsibility for the riots that have led to the deaths of five people and rattled the Paris government.

But it is just the latest in a litany of tensions between Paris and Baku and not the first time France has accused Azerbaijan of being behind an alleged disinformation campaign.

The riots in New Caledonia, a French territory lying between Australia and Fiji, were sparked by moves to agree a new voting law that supporters of independence from France say discriminates against the indigenous Kanak population.

Paris points to the sudden emergence of Azerbaijani flags alongside Kanak symbols in the protests, while a group linked to the Baku authorities is openly backing separatists while condemning Paris.

“This isn’t a fantasy. It’s a reality,” interior minister Gérald Darmanin told television channel France 2 when asked if Azerbaijan, China and Russia were interfering in New Caledonia.

“I regret that some of the Caledonian pro-independence leaders have made a deal with Azerbaijan. It’s indisputable,” he alleged.

But he added: “Even if there are attempts at interference… France is sovereign on its own territory, and so much the better”.

“We completely reject the baseless accusations,” Azerbaijan’s foreign ministry spokesman Ayhan Hajizadeh said.

“We refute any connection between the leaders of the struggle for freedom in Caledonia and Azerbaijan.”

In images widely shared on social media, a reportage broadcast Wednesday on the French channel TF1 showed some pro-independence supporters wearing T-shirts adorned with the Azerbaijani flag.

Tensions between Paris and Baku have grown in the wake of the 2020 war and 2023 lightning offensive that Azerbaijan waged to regain control of its breakaway Nagorno-Karabakh region from ethnic Armenian separatists.

France is a traditional ally of Christian Armenia, Azerbaijan’s neighbour and historic rival, and is also home to a large Armenian diaspora.

Darmanin said Azerbaijan – led since 2003 by President Ilham Aliyev, who succeeded his father Heydar – was a “dictatorship”.

On Wednesday, the Paris government also banned social network TikTok from operating in New Caledonia.

Tiktok, whose parent company is Chinese, has been widely used by protesters. Critics fear it is being employed to spread disinformation coming from foreign countries.

Azerbaijan invited separatists from the French territories of Martinique, French Guiana, New Caledonia and French Polynesia to Baku for a conference in July 2023.

The meeting saw the creation of the “Baku Initiative Group”, whose stated aim is to support “French liberation and anti-colonialist movements”.

The group published a statement this week condemning the French parliament’s proposed change to New Caledonia’s constitution, which would allow outsiders who moved to the territory at least 10 years ago the right to vote in its elections.

Pro-independence forces say that would dilute the vote of Kanaks, who make up about 40 percent of the population.

“We stand in solidarity with our Kanak friends and support their fair struggle,” the Baku Initiative Group said.

Raphael Glucksmann, the lawmaker heading the list for the French Socialists in June’s European Parliament elections, told Public Senat television that Azerbaijan had made “attempts to interfere… for months”.

He said the underlying problem behind the unrest was a domestic dispute over election reform, not agitation fomented by “foreign actors”.

But he accused Azerbaijan of “seizing on internal problems.”

A French government source, who asked not to be named, said pro-Azerbaijani social media accounts had on Wednesday posted an edited montage purporting to show two white police officers with rifles aimed at dead Kanaks.

“It’s a pretty massive campaign, with around 4,000 posts generated by (these) accounts,” the source told AFP.

“They are reusing techniques already used during a previous smear campaign called Olympia.”

In November, France had already accused actors linked to Azerbaijan of carrying out a disinformation campaign aimed at damaging its reputation over its ability to host the Olympic Games in Paris. Baku also rejected these accusations.