France: Party System Change and the Demise of the Post-Gaullist Right

The French mainstream Right finds itself at its weakest in the history of the Fifth Republic. As a political bloc that had dominated the first twenty years of the Gaullist regime, and strategically addressed the Left-wing challenge of the 1980s to form an apparently monolithic single party in the early 2000s, the governing forces of the Right – principally Les Republicains (LR), with the centre-right Mouvement Democrate (Modem) and the centrist Union des Democrates et Independants (UDI) – find themselves fragmented and electorally diminished. In 2017, the simultaneous challenge of centrist and radical candidates proffering political renewal forged the perfect storm for LR, as indeed it did for the incumbent, and failing, as well as the governing Left PS. In this contribution, we examine the electoral and party dynamics which led to this outcome, focusing on changes in voter demand along issue dimensions as well as the continued presence of a political opportunity structure driven by institutional logics and the stability allowed by the absorptive capacity of the French political system.