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00:00Gérôme, thank you for being so patient, former Senator for Les Républicains,
00:05can we talk about the right of French politics tonight? Because those exit polls saying
00:10your party, that you represented in the Senate for a very long time, got just 10% of the vote
00:16tonight, Eric Ciotti off to join the far right, the national rally, how are you feeling? Does
00:22your party exist tonight? Well it exists, I mean first of all I'll remind you that there are two
00:28chambers in the Parliament and in the Senate, we have the majority, we have more than 100 senators,
00:36we have several big areas, big regions of France, we have big cities, so the party exists. It's
00:44true it has had a very bad run lately, in 2022 it was about the same number, the same percentage,
00:54but yes I'm extremely angry at Eric Ciotti, I had the opportunity to say it on many occasions
01:02and here in France 24 as well, because there's loyalty which is an extremely important aspect
01:09in politics, or it should be, and what is done to his party is not acceptable. Just to save a seat,
01:17this is unforgivable. He should at least have waited for the second run, but he was so afraid
01:23to lose his seat apparently. But if I may, isn't there an argument that Eric Ciotti went to the
01:29far right, to the national rally, because that's where your voters are? Unfortunately yes, we have
01:37our voters, many of our voters are extremely angry, like the rest of France, they're angry about the
01:43lack of security, they're angry about the inflation, they're angry because they have problems you know
01:50feeding the children for some of them, so there's a huge social circumstance which makes people
01:57angry, and that's why all of France, or a lot of France, turned towards the extreme right.
02:02But you know politically, historically, our party has always stood very strongly against the extremes,
02:11against the far right, and it has always been the case, and to see this kind of attitude is terrible.
02:18Yes I had been moving towards the extreme right, that's also one of the reasons why I decided to
02:24leave my party and not run again for the senate in last September, but we don't want an extreme right.
02:33But I should add something, there's also a problem, and a strong problem for us with the extreme left,
02:40because as you said Sandro, I mean when you have a political group which makes an alliance with an
02:50extreme left, I mean you've got to listen to what Mélenchon is saying, this is absolutely horrendous.
02:57I mean the kind of anti-semitism, you know the appeal of almost to violence, this is unacceptable,
03:04and that's why I've been very disappointed, because on the day after the European elections
03:09I was hoping that Raphael Glucksmann, who was newly elected for the socialist party,
03:15would unite and would launch this republican front to fight against the extreme from the left and
03:23from the right, and unfortunately that hasn't happened, and I think this is a terrible mistake,
03:30and we're paying the consequences now.