Prime Minister Theresa May (left) and German Chancellor Angela Merkel address the media at the Chancellery in Berlin, November 2016. Stefan Rousseau/Press Association. All rights reserved. The first round of the French presidential election saw for the first time in history the candidates of the two big political families (the Gaullist centre-right and the socialist centre-left) failing to advance to the second round. Pressured between competitors from the centre and the radical left, the dismal result of the Socialist Party was another confirmation of European social-democracy’s long-standing and much discussed state of crisis.
Little comparable alarmism has been generated about the European centre-right despite Francois Fillon’s failure to make it to the second round. This may be because Fillon’s failure can plausibly be attributed to circumstantial factors. But this explanation underestimates the extent to which the dynamics of the campaign could have challenged Fillon’s neoliberal economics and social traditionalism in a society that, as the election results showed, was not particularly supportive of either.
In fact, I would argue that Fillon’s failure is the latest expression of a crisis of the centre-right that has been building for some time now. It appeared first in 2015 as a crisis of electoral performance, with centre-right parties losing elections in a number of European countries (Greece, Portugal, Ireland, Spain, Poland). The sense of crisis was mitigated by the fact that in some cases (Ireland, Spain) centre-right parties remained in office due to the fragmentation of the opposition.
