Union for a Popular Movement


The Union for a Popular Movement was a liberal-conservative political party in France, largely inspired by the Gaullist tradition. During its existence, the UMP was one of the two major parties in French politics along with the Socialist Party. In May 2015, the party was succeeded by The Republicans.
Nicolas Sarkozy, the then president of the UMP, was elected president of France in the 2007 French presidential election, until he was later defeated by PS candidate François Hollande in the 2012 presidential election. After the November 2012 party congress, the UMP experienced internal fractioning and was plagued by monetary scandals which forced its president Jean-François Copé to resign. After Sarkozy's re-election as UMP president in November 2014, he put forward an amendment to change the name of the party to The Republicans, which was approved and came into effect on 30 May 2015. The UMP enjoyed an absolute majority in the National Assembly from 2002 to 2012, and was a member of the European People's Party, the Centrist Democrat International and the International Democrat Union.

History

Background

Since the 1980s, the political groups of the parliamentary right have joined forces around the values of economic liberalism and the building of Europe. Their rivalries had contributed to their defeat in the 1981 and 1988 legislative elections.
Before the 1993 legislative election, the Gaullist Rally for the Republic and the centrist Union for French Democracy formed an electoral alliance, the Union for France. However, in the 1995 presidential campaign, they were both divided between followers of Jacques Chirac, who was eventually elected, and supporters of Prime Minister Edouard Balladur. After their defeat in the 1997 legislative election, the RPR and UDF created the Alliance for France in order to coordinate the actions of their parliamentary groups.

Foundation and early years

Before the 2002 presidential campaign, the supporters of President Jacques Chirac, divided in three centre-right parliamentary parties, founded an association named Union on the Move. After Chirac's re-election, in order to contest the legislative election jointly, the Union for the Presidential Majority was created. It was renamed "Union for a Popular Movement" and as such established as a permanent organisation.
Various parties, such as the Gaullist-conservative Rally for the Republic, the conservative-liberal party Liberal Democracy, a sizeable portion of the Union for French Democracy, merged their parties into the new party over the course of the first year. The UDF's Christian Democrats, the Radical Party and the centrist Popular Party for French Democracy, aligned themselves with the party for the 2002 French legislative election. In the UMP four major French political families were thus represented: Gaullism, republicanism, Christian democracy and radicalism.
Chirac's close ally Alain Juppé became the party's first president at the party's founding congress at the Bourget in November 2002. Juppé won 79.42% of the vote, defeating Nicolas Dupont-Aignan, the leader of the party's Eurosceptic Arise the Republic faction, and three other candidates. During the party's earlier years, it was marked by tensions and rivalries between Juppé and other chiraquiens and supporters of Nicolas Sarkozy, the then-Minister of the Interior.
In the 2004 regional elections, the UMP suffered a heavy blow, winning the presidencies of only 2 out of 22 regions in metropolitan France and only half of the departments in the simultaneous 2004 cantonal elections. In the 2004 European Parliament election on 13 June 2004, the UMP also suffered another heavy blow, winning 16.6% of the vote, far behind the Socialist Party, and only 16 seats.
The membership in the early 2000s grew from 100,000 to 300,000 after members received a greater say in the selection of the party's presidential candidate.

Nicolas Sarkozy (2004–2012)

Juppé resigned the party's presidency on 15 July 2004 after being found guilty in a corruption scandal in January of the same year. Nicolas Sarkozy rapidly announced that he would take over the presidency of the UMP and resign his position as finance minister, ending months of speculation. On 28 November 2004, Sarkozy was elected to the party's presidency with 85.09% of the votes against 9.1% for Dupont-Aignan and 5.82% for Christine Boutin, the leader of the UMP's social conservatives. Having gained control of what had been Chirac's party, Sarkozy focused the party machinery and his energies on the 2007 presidential election.
The failure of the referendum on the European Constitution on 25 May 2005 led to the fall of the government of Jean-Pierre Raffarin and to the formation of a new cabinet, presided by another UMP politician, Dominique de Villepin. However, during this time, the UMP under Sarkozy gained a record number of new members and rejuvenated itself in preparation of the 2007 election. On 14 January 2007, Sarkozy was nominated unopposed as the UMP's presidential candidate for the 2007 election.
On the issues, the party under Sarkozy publicly disapproved of Turkey's proposed membership in the European Union, which Chirac had previously endorsed several times publicly, and generally took a more right-wing position.
On 22 April 2007, Nicolas Sarkozy won the plurality of votes in the first round of the 2007 presidential election. On 6 May he faced the Socialist Party candidate Ségolène Royal in the second round and won, taking 53.06% of the vote. As a consequence, he resigned from the presidency of the UMP on 14 May 2007, two days before becoming President of the French Republic. François Fillon was appointed prime minister. On 17 June 2007, at a 2007 legislative election, the UMP gained a majority in the National Assembly with 313 out of 577 seats.
Following Sarkozy's election to the presidency, interim leader Jean-Claude Gaudin prevented a leadership struggle between Patrick Devedjian and Jean-Pierre Raffarin by announcing that the UMP should have a collegial leadership while Sarkozy was President of the Republic. In July, the UMP's national council approved an amendment to the party's statute allowing for a collegial leadership around three vice-presidents and a secretary-general and two associate secretaries-general.
On 9 March 2008, municipal and cantonal elections, the party performed quite poorly, losing numerous cities, such as Toulouse and Strasbourg, as well as eight departmental presidencies to the left. Xavier Bertrand was selected as secretary-general of the party in late 2008 to replace Patrick Devedjian, who resigned to take up a cabinet position.
In the 2009 European Parliament election on 7 June 2009, the UMP ran common lists with its junior allies including Jean-Louis Borloo's Radical Party, the New Centre and Modern Left. The UMP list won 27.9%, a remarkably good result for a governing party in off-year "mid-term" elections, and elected 29 MEPs, significantly improving on the UMP's poor result in the 2004 European election – also an off-year election. However, in the 2010 regional elections on 14 and 21 March 2010, the UMP obtained a very poor result with only 26%. While it lost Corsica, it retained Alsace but also defeated the left in La Réunion and French Guiana.
In a cabinet reshuffle in November 2010, which disappointed centrists within and outside the UMP, François Fillon was confirmed prime minister and Alain Juppé re-joined the government. Among those who resigned from the cabinet were Bernard Kouchner, Hervé Morin and, above all, Jean-Louis Borloo. Xavier Bertrand, who re-joined the government, was replaced as general-secretary of the UMP by Jean-François Copé on 17 November 2010.
The party suffered another major electoral defeat in the 2011 cantonal elections held on 20 and 27 March 2011, and in September, the centre-right lost control of the French Senate for the first time in the history of the Fifth Republic.
In May 2011, during a party congress, the Radical Party, led by Borloo, decided to leave the UMP and launch The Alliance, a new centrist coalition.
The party opted not to organise primaries ahead of the 2012 presidential election and endorsed Nicolas Sarkozy's bid for second term. Sarkozy lost reelection to the Socialist Party candidate François Hollande on 6 May 2012, winning 48.36% in the runoff. The party was defeated by the new president's left-wing majority in the subsequent legislative election.

After May 2012

Prior to Sarkozy's defeat on 6 May, the UMP's secretary-general Jean-François Copé announced that he supported the creation of internal "movements" within the party and the organisation of primaries for the next presidential election.

Campaign for the November 2012 congress

The UMP's political bureau announced the organisation of a party congress on 18 and 25 November 2012, leading prominent party leaders to organise factions and "movements" to influence the party's new direction.
Ultimately, two candidates amassed the required endorsements to run for the party's presidency: former prime minister François Fillon and incumbent party secretary-general Jean-François Copé. Nathalie Kosciusko-Morizet, Bruno Le Maire, Xavier Bertrand, Henri Guaino, and Dominique Dord had also announced their candidacies but did not meet tough candidacy requirements.
The campaign between Fillon and Copé lasted two months. Fillon had a strong lead in polls of UMP 'sympathizers' and was backed by most UMP parliamentarians while Copé claimed he was the candidate of party activists rather than party 'barons'. However, Copé remained as secretary-general and retained control of the party machinery.
While Fillon's campaign was regarded as more consensual, moderate and centre-right; Copé campaigned as the candidate of the droite décomplexée and introduced issues such as anti-white racism. However, both candidates received support from moderate and conservative members of the party and their main differences were in rhetoric, style and temperament. Copé, again, appeared more militant and activist, saying that he would support and participate in street demonstrations while Fillon disagreed with his rival.
Six 'motions' were submitted to party voters; under the new statutes, motions which won over 10% of the vote at the congress would be recognised as "movements" by the UMP leadership, granted financial autonomy and receive positions in the party structures.