It played a major role during the Fourth Republic (before 1958), but since creation of the Fifth Republic, its importance has decreased significantly. The party has mostly run as a minor ally of bigger centre-right parties. The CNI and its predecessors have been classical liberal and economically liberal parties opposed to the dirigisme of the left, centre and Gaullist right.
History
Fourth Republic
The Centre National des Indépendants was founded in January 1949 with the aim of uniting centre-right and right-wing parliamentarians, dispersed between a plethora of parties such as the Republican Party of Liberty and other modérés (moderates). It adopted its current name in 1951 after it merged with Paul Antier's small Peasant Party (the successor of the pre-war French Agrarian and Peasant Party).
As the leading right-wing force during the Fourth Republic, it won around 14% of the vote in 1951 and 1956 and participated in Third Force government coalitions, taking a major role in governments at the beginning of the 1950s. Antoine Pinay, its most popular figure, was Prime Minister in 1952, followed by Joseph Laniel from 1953 to 1954. René Coty, a CNIP parliamentarian, was elected President of France in 1953. The party's power declined after the Dien Bien Phu military disaster in Indochina in 1954, and it remained in opposition for most of the last two years of the Fourth Republic after the 1956 elections.
In 1958, it supported Charles de Gaulle's comeback and approved the constitution of the Fifth Republic. Having won over 130 seats in the 1958 election, it was a member of the Gaullist governing coalition until 1962. Antoine Pinay, the Minister of the Economy until 1960, spearheaded a successful monetary reform in 1959 (the introduction of the nouveau franc). However, the party quickly clashed with the Gaullists. It opposed Charles de Gaulle's policy of self-determination in Algeria, disliked his interventionist economic policies, criticized the euroscepticism of De Gaulle and opposed the growing "presidentialisation" of the regime. On October 5, 1962, 107 CNIP deputies voted no-confidence in Georges Pompidou's government,[4] opposing de Gaulle's constitutional reform on the election of the president by universal suffrage. However, the CNIP cabinet ministers, led by future president Valéry Giscard d'Estaing, continued to support de Gaulle. With the support of 24 deputies, they founded their own party, the Independent Republicans (RI).
Severely weakened by the split and its opposition to the October 1962 referendum, it suffered a major defeat in the 1962, left with only a handful of seats. It allied itself with the Popular Republican Movement (MRP) to form the Democratic Centre, later known as Progress and Modern Democracy, in which the CNIP was only a small component.
The party has never regained its former strength and became a marginal conservative group. In the 1980s, it attempted to serve as a 'bridge' between the parliamentary right (RPR and UDF) and the far-right (FN).[2] In the 1986 election, CNIP members appeared on RPR-UDF lists but it won three seats through local alliances with the FN in some departments. In 1997, it formed an ephemeral alliance with Philippe de Villiers' Movement for France.
Since 2008, it hesitated between pursuing an alliance with President Nicolas Sarkozy's UMP or allying itself with the centrist allies of the presidential majority, most notably Jean-Louis Borloo's Radical Party. It joined the Liaison Committee for the Presidential Majority, a short-lived structuring committee composed of the UMP and its close allies. Gilles Bourdouleix, who took the reins of the party in 2009, announced in 2011 that his party was negotiating an alliance with Borloo's centrist Alliance républicaine, écologiste et sociale.[5] Although these negotiations were unsuccessful, they provoked a major feud with the party's former leader, Annick du Roscoät,[6] who wanted the party to keep its conservative orientation while Bourdouleix has sought to reposition the CNIP towards the centre-right.
On September 19, 2012, Bourdouleix - the party's only remaining deputy - announced that the CNIP was joining Borloo's centre-right Union of Democrats and Independents (UDI).[7] He had already joined the UDI group in the National Assembly in June 2012. But on 10 September, the CNIP was expelled from the UDI after Gilles Bourdouleix had declared the "Maybe Hitler hadn't killed enough romas".[8]
^Jean-Pierre Rioux, La France de la Quatrième République, tome 2, "L'expansion et l'impuissance", Nouvelle histoire de la France contemporaine n°16, Seuil, Paris, 1983, p.90
^Proceedings of the National Assembly, 4 October 1962, second sitting; vote tally on p. 3268. p. 38 in the PDF file
