Posted on 05/05/2019 10:26:39 AM PDT by CondoleezzaProtege
French conservative Les Républicains leader Laurent Wauquiez is set to name hardliner François-Xavier Bellamy to lead his party’s list for May European elections. The nod has been criticised within the party for pushing LR yet further to the right.
Unknown to the general public, the 33-year-old Bellamy is an unabashed conservative and a rising star in French conservative circles. A deputy mayor of Versailles since 2008, the young philosophy professor has authored two remarked-upon book-length essays. He notably also took part in the inception of Sens Commun, a political movement that grew out of the Manif Pour Tous anti-gay-marriage rallies and which has sometimes been likened to US hardline conservatives’ Tea Party movement. Bellamy is known to be opposed to abortion “personally”, although he has said he is not willing to call into question the law that allows it in France.
The conservative Les Républicains’ objective in designating Bellamy as its list-topping candidate in the May 26th European Parliament elections is clear: Relegated to a third-place finish in the 2017 French presidential election behind Marine Le Pen’s far-right National Front (now National Rally), the wounded conservative party is looking to attract an electorate split between backing LR and supporting a revamped NR.
“France is the eldest daughter of the Church: on societal issues, a part of the right-wing remains within that traditional vision,” Harris Interactive pollster Jean-Daniel Lévy observed to Agence France-Presse.
For his part, Wauquiez’s wager is undisguised. After all, back in November, it was before a crowd of Sens Commun activists that the 43-year-old conservative leader took on the battle against expanding the right to medically assisted reproduction to all French women. Speaking to a rapt crowd, Wauquiez’s warned then of a slippery slope towards surrogacy and evoked eugenics and Nazism to make his point.
(Excerpt) Read more at france24.com ...
What a biased headline: “Catholic hardliner”.
Couple of thoughts:
1) I wonder if this guy is an ACTUAL conservative. We all know what "conservative by French standards" usually means. Remember when Nicholas Sarkozy was advertised by the media as a "hard-right French conservative who loves America" and various FReepers had orgasms over his presidency and fawned over him and family. Then Sarkozy hailed Obama as the messiah and his BFF, only parted ways with Obama when Obama wasn't liberal ENOUGH on global warming for his tastes, pushed hard for gaystapo agenda, gun control, abortion on demand, and couldn't contain his contempt for Netenyahu. If that's a "right-wing conservative", I'd hate to see what left-wing looks like over there.
2) If he IS an actual mainstream conservative (as Fieldmarshaldj notes, the media will label him as an ultra-right racist bigoted fascist in that case), I wonder if the media and various FReepers will claim a traditional conservative Catholic winning in a majority Catholic country is somehow a victory for "the Evangelicals" and that the staunch Catholic is "the Evangelical candidate" as they've claimed in the case of Brazil. Cuz, you know, Barack Obama winning over TONS of Jewish voters somehow makes him "the Jewish candidate" and his win a "victory for Judaism", right? Same "logic".
He’s a French conservative - which means he cannot be shoehorned into an American understanding of conservatism.
When thinking about French conservatives it sometimes helps to know if the “conservative” in question is “modern” or “monarchist”.
I’m suprised that such a person still even exists to be honest.
I don’t know a thing about him, but the phrase “Catholic hard-liner” is music to my ears.
I was thinking the same thing... though my ears are "evangelical"... :) These days a politician who is sane and openly believes in God is a good find.
Oops... forgot to ping you guys to post #3
He doesn’t sound great in that article.
Yeah, I never said he was great. He’s French. There aren’t too many great Frenchmen these days.
Jean Luc Ponty, for me is the only one who comes to mind.
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