LR Elections: “Neither Wauquiez nor Retailleau are truly liberal”

The Republicans, liberals? The rumor is persistent, but the question matters. Of course, we first consider the election of the LR president in terms of personalities: Retailleau or Wauquiez , Tartempion or Machin. That's the gist of it – 2027 obliges. This primacy of the presidential election is driving us collectively crazy. We are no longer even surprised, in 2025, by such a bizarre question addressed to the President of the Republic, for example taken at random: "Will you be a candidate in 2032?" This kind of nonsense passes with such casualness that it no longer even provokes a shrug of the shoulders. Yet it is in vain that we wait for our savior, the providential man. So, enough about people, let's talk about ideas.

Difficult question. Nothing really separates the two candidates in substance: and therein lies the significant fact. Unlike the 2022 LR primary, which saw differentiated lines, such as those of Juvin or Bertrand, oppose each other, and unlike the internal election of December 2022 marked by the Pradié candidacy, all sharing a line deemed more social, this election is first and foremost about in-grouping. Wauquiez and Retailleau agree on the denunciation of wokism, decivilization , bureaucracy, the obese state, and the crisis of authority. The personal outcome of this election therefore matters little: it will confirm the transformation of LR, as initiated by Ciotti, towards a frankly… Frankly what? Liberal, of course!

Liberal? One can seriously doubt it. Wauquiez recently proposed "qualified majority voting," the possibility of overriding the case law of the Constitutional Council and enshrining in the Constitution that a judge can no longer overrule a subsequent law based on an international treaty. Retailleau at least had the merit of clarity: "The rule of law is neither intangible nor sacred."

And here are two men who constantly describe immigration in systematically degrading terms, with measures that show little regard for fundamental rights - such as in Saint-Pierre-et-Miquelon , which has been transformed into an expulsion zone. Both invoke figures of savagery and decivilization to legitimize a security agenda that, far from responding to the real state of the law, confirms its progressive erosion (already well underway): global security law, algorithmic surveillance, extension of suspicion. This logic enshrines the presumption of guilt, and thereby, the negation of the liberal principle of the presumption of innocence.

Added to this is the crusade against "welfare." The RSA ( Responsible Social Welfare) is denounced not for its cost—less than 1% of the budget—but for what it embodies: unconditional solidarity. Yet it is this unconditionality that underpins civility in a liberal democracy. It is not only the fallacious correspondence between individual will and the capacity to work that must be denounced. To be recognized as a vulnerable being, susceptible to assistance and care, is to affirm political dignity. This is not to flatter laziness, but to recognize that poverty is often less a matter of inertia than of wear and tear.

This is where populism surfaces. By opposing liberal democracy, which enshrines the primacy of law and human dignity, with an arithmetic democracy where numbers rule over institutions, we can better claim it according to a plebiscitary logic to better dissolve the obstacles posed by countervailing powers.

The challenge of this election therefore lies in the capture of the term liberal by illiberals. This reversal is part of a global dynamic of the Western right, supported by financial networks. Pierre-Édouard Stérin , a central player in this recomposition in France, assumes this strategy of alliance between "liberals", conservatives, nationalists and other reactionary families. At the heart of this system, a political vision which, although less outrageous, finds bridges with the thought of Curtis Yarvin, American theorist of the technological monarchy, inspiration of JD Vance .

The state must be a monarchy, Yarvin tells us, citing the example of Apple, its extreme internal verticality, which produces effective action. The state must be run like a business, Stérin relays. The meetings between him and Retailleau are now well documented. And Wauquiez is now calling for a rallying of the right.

Liberals are tempted. Lower taxes, trim the fat of the bureaucratic mammoth: these urgent needs are real. But these programmatic convergences cannot mask profound philosophical divergences. By reducing freedom to property, the role of the state ceases to be arbitrary: it becomes executive, vertical, rapid—no longer the guarantor of rights, but of order. Proprietarianism does not negate the state: it instrumentalizes it. It purifies it of its social functions, strips it of its countervailing powers, to turn it into a fortress serving private interests. Nothing new under the sun: as Jérôme Perrier reminded us in a remarkable note for Fondapol, Rothbard was already advocating such an alliance in the 1990s.

Hayek already made Aron uncomfortable. Today, it is no longer a question of unease, but of frank opposition. Liberals must have clear ideas: the heirs of the French Revolution cannot make a pact with the heirs of the conservative German revolution. In this kind of rapprochement, it is never a question of a pact—but of abdication.