Member of the European Parliament Nicolas Bay, a vice president of Eric Zemmour’s party Reconquest, has called a right-wing party alliance essential going into the French parliamentary elections in order to have a real opposition to President Emmanuel Macron.
Mr Bay is among the three vice presidents of Reconquest who have pushed for a united right-wing alliance ahead of June’s French legislative elections, along with Marine Le Pen’s niece Marion Marechal.
Speaking to Breitbart London, Bay explained the proposal to unite the right, saying, “A coalition of the patriotic right is essential if we want to give the French people the representation they deserve and especially a real opposition to Emmanuel Macron. This does not mean that we have to merge into a single party: we will each keep our specificities.”
Bay stated that an alliance could form with Marine Le Pen’s National Rally, members of Gaullist Nicolas Dupont-Aignan’s movement as well as members so the centre-right Les Republicains who did not want to become partners of President Macron.
“According to a recent poll, 74% of RN voters and 94% of Reconquête voters want such an agreement. The national bloc represents 12.5 million votes, far ahead of the 8.1 million obtained by the RN alone,” Bay said, citing figures put forward earlier this week by Eric Zemmour.
“If we add up our results from the first round, the patriotic right came out on top in 246 constituencies. The RN alone came out on top in only 100 constituencies. Together, we could have 145 MPs. But if we are divided, there will only be a handful of MPs elected to the National Assembly. The left-wing parties and the Macronist centre manage to unite: why not us?” he said.
Until February of this year, Bay was a vice president of Marine Le Pen’s National Rally (RN) but defected to Zemmour’s Reconquest after allegations had been made that Bay had passed on information to the Zenmour campaign. Bay denied the accusations, calling them “grotesque and crude.”
It is unclear how many seats Reconquest would win without an alliance, but this week Le Pen’s National Rally stated it would not run candidates in four seats being contested by Reoncquest candidates, including that of Reconquest vice president Guillaume Peltier, a former high-ranking member of Les Republicains.
Bay told Breitbart he was confident his party would gain seats in the French parliament, saying: “We have well-known personalities, favourable constituencies, activist teams that are both numerous and motivated, a programme that has been able to seduce a diverse electorate, from the RN as well as LR, and that includes both well-off and working-class categories of French people… Yes, we can get a lot of MPs elected, but only if we build a coalition as our opponents know how to do.”
So far, members so the National Rally have rejected the idea of a formal alliance of conservative and populist parties, with Louis Aliot, RN mayor of Perpignan, stating that Zemmour should be “more humble” after winning seven per cent of the vote in the first round of the presidential elections.