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Widely expected to recapture France’s presidency and win a parliamentary majority in the 2017 elections, France’s mainstream Right instead suffered a crushing and divisive defeat. A major reason for this was contingent: the selection of a candidate who three months before polling day was placed under investigation for embezzling public funds. Other reasons were more structural, in particular the progressive dislocation of the bipolar multipartism which had characterised France’s party system for over four decades and the resultant strategic divisions within the Right. Although broadly chronological, this analysis of the long electoral cycle of 2016–2017 assesses the respective importance of proximate and long-term factors in the Right’s defeat.
