With Marine Le Pen sidelined, at least temporarily, it was inevitable that politicians from the not-so-center-right would make a pitch for her votes. Laurent Wauquiez, locked in a race for the leadership of LR that he is currently losing to Bruno Reetailleau, is first off the blocks with a proposal worthy of Donald Trump: he wants to send immigrants who have been served with an order to leave France to a detention center, a sort of French Guantanamo or El Salvadoran-style maximum security prison, in St.-Pierre-et-Miquelon. There’s nothing novel about the proposal; similar ideas for disposing of unwanted human beings in prison colonies far from the Hexagon, from torrid Guiana to frigid St.-Pierre, have been floated before. But Wauquiez hopes to kill two birds with one stone: he seeks to wrest the leadership of LR, which was once his for the taking, from the new kid on the block, the current minister of the interior, while at the same time bidding for the far-right votes either man will need to mount a credible run for the presidency.
Thus far, Wauquiez proposal has been met mainly with mockery, but hope springs eternal. Meanwhile, political observers wait to see if Retailleau will respond with a surenchère of his own or stick to the position he has already staked out, which he may well judge to be tough enough to appeal to RN voters while not quite as loufoque as Wauquiez’s bid, which may help him hold on to his current lead in the race to head the LR.
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The expression “unprincipled educated idiot” comes to mind.
There is a rule for French primaries inside political parties: the more radical side usually wins the primaries because they appeal to the very few militants of political parties. Winning the presidential election afterwards is a very different proposition because a candidate then needs to appeal to more than the few tens of thousands of his/her party. Wauquiez will discover that, probably too late.