Union for a Popular Movement

Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia - Cite This Source

The Union for a Popular Movement (Union pour un Mouvement Populaire, UMP) is a centre-right French political party.

Founded in 2002, the party has an absolute majority in the National Assembly and a plurality in the Senate. Its candidate Nicolas Sarkozy was elected President of France in 2007. The UMP is a member of the European People's Party (EPP), of the Centrist Democrat International (CDI) and of the International Democrat Union (IDU).

History

Premises

Since the 1980s, the political groups of the parliamentary right joined forces around the values of economic liberalism and the building of Europe. Their rivalries had contributed to their defeat in the 1981 and 1988 elections. Some politicians advocated the formation of a united right-wing party. Before the 1993 legislative election, the Gaullist-conservative Rally for the Republic (RPR) and the centrist Union for French Democracy (UDF) formed an electoral alliance, the Union for France. But it was divided between the followers of Jacques Chirac and the supporters of Edouard Balladur. After their defeat in the 1997 legislative election, the right-wing parties created the Alliance for France.

Foundation

Before the 2002 presidential campaign, the supporters of President Chirac who were divided in three right-wing parliamentary parties, founded an association, named Union on the Move (Union en mouvement). After Chirac's re-election, in order to prepare the legislative election, the Union for the Presidential Majority (Union pour la majorité présidentielle) was created. It was re-named Union for a Popular Movement some months later, establishing the UMP as a permanent organization rather than simply as the umbrella organization for Jacques Chirac's supporters.

The UMP was founded as a merger of the Gaullist-conservative Rally for the Republic (RPR), the conservative-liberal Liberal Democracy (DL), a sizeable portion of the centrist Union for French Democracy (UDF), more precisely the UDF's Christian Democrats (such as Philippe Douste-Blazy and Jacques Barrot), the social-liberal Radical Party and the centrist Popular Party for French Democracy (both associate parties of the UDF until 2002).

The party was thus born out of the meeting of four major French political traditions: Gaullism, Liberalism (also known as Republicanism in France), Christian Democracy (Popularism) and Radicalism.

As indicated by its initial name, the UMP generally supported the policies of President Jacques Chirac. However, in 2004, the party showed increasing signs of independence. The unpopularity with the electorate of Jacques Chirac and Jean-Pierre Raffarin's government led most members of the UMP to support Nicolas Sarkozy, a rival of Chirac. The party also publicly disapproved of Turkey's proposed membership in the European Union, which Chirac had previously endorsed several times publicly.

Nicolas Sarkozy

The first president of the UMP, Alain Juppé, a close associate of Jacques Chirac, resigned on 15 July 2004 after being convicted of political corruption in January of the same year. On 29 November 2004, Nicolas Sarkozy announced that he would officially take over the presidency of the UMP and resign his position as finance minister, ending months of speculation.

In the 2004 French regional elections the UMP suffered a heavy blow, winning the presidencies of only 2 out of 22 regions in Metropolitan France and only half of the departments (the right had previously won numerous departmental presidencies). The failure of the referendum on the European Constitution of 25 May 2005 led to the fall of the government of Jean-Pierre Raffarin and to the formation of a new cabinet, presided by another UMP politician, Dominique de Villepin.

On 22 April 2007 Nicolas Sarkozy won the plurality of votes in the first round of the 2007 presidential election. In the second round he faced Socialist Candidate Ségolène Royal. On May 6, 2007 he won the presidential election, garnering 53.06% of the vote. As a consequence, he resigned from the presidency of the UMP on 14 May 2007, two days before becoming President of the French Republic. On 17 June, in the legislative election, UMP again gained a majority in the National Assembly with 313 out of 577 seats, though it was less than expected following opinion polls and lost about 40 to 60 seats.

In the municipal and cantonal elections held in March 2008, the party suffered a blow, as a result of the unpopularity of Nicolas Sarkozy. It lost numerous cities, such as Toulouse and Strasbourg and also lost 8 departmental presidencies to the left.