France’s slide to the extreme right is the stuff of both farce and tragedy | Harrison Stetler

The Le Pen family drama, Eric Ciotti apparently locking himself in his office ... it would almost be funny if it weren't so bleak

Eric Ciotti, exit stage right. On 11 June, the leader of France's legacy centre-right party Les Republicains (LR) went on TV to finally set the record straight. With France's leftwing parties negotiating a popular front" in the lead-up to the snap elections on 30 June and 7 July, Ciotti announced that he would seek an unprecedented alliance with Marine Le Pen's National Rally (RN) after its commanding victory in last Sunday's elections to the European parliament.

This was the latest turning point provoked by Emmanuel Macron's surprise dissolution of parliament on Sunday, which has provoked a major political crisis likely to result in a shake-up of political forces and loyalties. Of course, the old centre-right had long since embraced the hallmarks of Le Pen-style politics - from the obsessive fear of national decline and culture wars against French Muslims to to embracing the so-called great replacement" theory. But the custodian party of what the French still like to call Gaullism" has clung to an at least rhetorical rejection of the Le Pen family's political project. The National Rally is the rebranded form of the Front National, the party founded by Jean-Marie Le Pen and other neo-fascists in 1972 as they nursed the wounds of Charles de Gaulle's recognition of defeat in France's colonial war over Algeria.