Last modified: 2008-12-06 by ivan sache
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![[Flag of UMP]](../images/f/fr}ump.gif)
Flag of UMP - Image by André Coutanche, 25 December 2005
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The UMP was founded in 2002 as a union of conservative parties
supporting Jacques Chirac for the presidential election. Early,
transient names of the party were Union en mouvement (4 April 2001)
and Union pour la majorité présidentielle (23 April 2002, two days
after the first round of the presidential election). The UMP is made of
the former conservative parties RPR (Rassemblement pour la
République) and DL (Démocratie Libérale), which formally disappeared and joined the UMP on 21 September 2002, and of members of the former
UDF (Union pour la Démocratie Française). The small Parti Radical
has the status of associate member. The founding act of the UMP is the
manifesto France alternance : pour un nouveau contrat politique,
cosigned by 160 Deputees and Senators from RPR, DL and UDF, and
published in the conservative reference newspaper Le Figaro on 13 January
2001. The manifesto was initiated by the former Prime Minister Alain
Juppé (RPR) and promoted by Jérôme Monod, Chirac's Private Councillor
at the palace of Elysée.
The foundation of the UMP is an attempt to unite the conservative
parties under a single leadership, which rarely happened in the history
of the Fourth Republic (1947-1959) and the Fifth Republic (1959-).
On 20 June 1946, Charles de Gaulle, Head of the Provisory Government of France, resigned. He proposed a new Constitution, very close to the
future Constitution of the Vth Republic, and founded on 7 April 1947
the RPF (Rassemblement du Peuple Français). Originally, the RPF had a
very wide range of voters and some of his leaders were from left
parties, but the world situation - the Cold War and the War of
Indochina - made the RPF evolve to a very conservative, anti-Communist
party. The RPF was disbanded in 1953.
In 1958, the Fifth Republic superseded the Fourth Republic. According
to the political system prescribed by the Constitution, the President of the Republic needs to be supported by a majority of Deputees
(majorité présidentielle); de Gaulle believed that a majority made by
several parties would prevent him to apply his ideas and would
reestablish the régime des partis that had caused the end of the Fourth
Republic. Therefore, he founded the "monolithic" UNR (Union pour la
Nouvelle République); the party was renamed UDR (Union pour la Défense
de la République) in 1968. After de Gaulle's death, the party was
renamed Union des Démocrates pour la République in 1971.
The big split occurred in 1976, when Prime Minister Jacques Chirac
resigned following a conflict with President Valéry Giscard d'Estaing. The UDR was transformed into the RPR (Rassemblement pour la
République), a party which claimed to be the only defender of de
Gaulle's heritage. The logotype of the party showed a Cross of Lorraine surmonted by a tricolor liberty cap. Most of the so-called Gaullist
"barons", de Gaulle's brother-in-arms during the Second World War,
joined the RPR. Giscard's supporters named themselves RI (Républicains
Indépendants) and promoted a break with de Gaulle's system and the
modernization od the country.
To compete with the RPR, Giscard needed his own presidential
party and founded in 1978 the UDF (Union pour la Démocratie
Française). In contrast with the "monolithic" RPR, the UDF was a loose
union of several parties, the most significant of them being the PR
(Parti Républicain, successor of the RI) and the CDS (Centre des
Démocrates Sociaux). The CDS represented Christian Democracy and was
the successor of the CD (Centre Démocrate), itself the successor of
the MRP (Mouvement Républicain Populaire) founded in 1944 by Georges
Bidault and Maurice Schumann. The MRP opposed de Gaulle and was often
nicknamed Mon Révérend Père because of its Catholic program. The
structure of the UDF was fairly complicated. Members of its component
parties were de facto members of the UDF, but it was also possible to
be a non-affiliated member (adhérent direct), that is being member of
the UDF without being member of a component party. This was for
instance the case of Raymond Barre, Giscard's last Prime Minister.
There were also relatives (apparentés), which were not members of the
party. The situation was so complicated that it was possible to be
registered as apparenté CDS adhérent direct UDF.
The RPR strongly blackmailed the UDF and especially the CDS, which
claimed to represent center-right: if you don't support us at the
national level, we won't support you at the local level. Since the RPR
was much bigger and better established locally, the UDF and the CDS
often had to approve projects that were in contradition with their own
program. The situation was even more complicated by the personal
antagonism between Chirac and Giscard; for the the second round of the
presidential election in 1981, Chirac told "he would not vote for
Giscard", which was a blatant call to defeat him. Giscard never forgave
him and still uses any possibility to take revenge.
It took a few years to the conservative parties, especially the RPR, to
admit that changeover (alternance) of political power between parties
was possible in France. The Constitution was tailor-made by de Gaulle
for himself and he probably never thought that the left parties could
reach the power. Following the so-called renovation movement, the CDS
was renamed FD (Force Démocrate) in 1995 and the PR was renamed DL
(Démocratie Libérale) in 1998. DL left the UDF under the guidance of
its leader Alain Madelin, an ultra partisan of free-market. The UDF
became the new UDF under the leadership of François Bayrou.
Madelin and Bayrou were candidates to the 2002 presidential election,
both with an alternative project to Chirac. Madelin's result was
pathetic but Bayrou attracted more votes than predicted by the political
analysts. Accordingly, DL joined the newly formed UMP but Bayrou
decided to remain out of the monolithic party. Since then, Bayrou
stands as the only credible conservative alternative to the UMP and
often expresses his opposition to the government. This cause another
problem in the UDF since some members individually joined the UMP.
There is currently only one Minister from the UDF in the UMP government
and he was very coldly welcomed during the last national meeting of his
party.
To be comprehensive, it must be added that not all members of the
former RPR joined the UMP. The most conservative members of the RPR
rejected the pro-European policy of the party and founded their own RPF
(Rassemblement pour la France) around the controversial former
Minister of the Interior Charles Pasqua. Ironically, Pasqua, once considered as the
best strategist of the RPR, was one of the warmest supporters of a wide
union of the conservative parties.
Nicolas Sarkozy was elected President of the UMP in 2004 and took the control of the party from Chirac's friends. Official candidate of the party, Sarkozy was elected President of the Republic on 6 May 2007. In July 2007, the statutes of UMP were amended, replacing the party's President by a collegiate direction formed of three Vice Presidents.
In the legislative elections that followed the 2007 presidential elections, the UMP won 313 out of the 577 seats.
Ivan Sache, 2 December 2008
The referendum in France on the proposed EU 'constitution' resulted in a lot of tv coverage in Britain, including many shots of political rallies, for and against, with flags being waved. This coverage provided evidence that the UMP has a flag. I haven't got screen shots of the UMP flags - however, I watched the tape several times to make sure they really were flags and not just banners or placards.
The flag of UMP is vertically divided blue-red with a white tree in the middle, surmonting the party initials in white.
The image shown above was made after the emblem available on the party website
André Coutanche & Ivan Sache, 29 August 2005