France's conservative Les Republicains (LR) party, squeezed by President Emmanuel Macron on one side and the far-right on the other, elects a new leader this weekend in a ballot that will matter for Macron's chances of pushing through his reforms, Reuters reported.
Both the frontrunner Eric Ciotti and his main opponent Bruno Retailleau hail from a more right-wing branch of LR than its current leadership, and they are set to push hard to toughen bills on a broad range of issues including immigration.
After he lost his outright majority in parliament in June, in the wake of winning a second presidential mandate, Macron, whose initial neither-left-nor-right centrist platform has veered more and more to the right, is counting on LR to see parliament adopt key bills.
But with its survival at stake, LR, with its new leadership, is set to demand a high price for its support - or refuse it. While LR or its predecessors governed France for much of its post-war history, they scored a meagre 4.78% in the presidential election in April.
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