Union for a Popular Movement

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"UMP" redirects here. For other uses, see UMP (disambiguation).

Union pour un Mouvement Populaire




Leader	Nicolas Sarkozy

Founded	2002
Headquarters	55, rue La Boétie 75384 Paris Cedex 08

Political Ideology	Conservatism, Gaullism, Christian Democracy, Liberal conservatism, Conservative liberalism, Liberalism and Libertarianism (minority factions)
European Affiliation	European People's Party and European Democrat Union
International Affiliation	International Democrat Union
Colours	Blue, Red

The 2007 Presidential Election Candidate

Website	www.u-m-p.org

See also	Constitution of France France Politics French Parliament French Government French President Political parties Elections

The Union for a Popular Movement (Union pour un Mouvement Populaire, UMP), initially named the Union for the Presidential Majority (Union pour la Majorité Présidentielle), is the main French conservative political party.

As indicated by its initial name, the UMP generally supports 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 administration 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.

The party has an absolute majority in the National Assembly but relies on its reluctant junior partner, the UDF, in the Senate.

The UMP is a member of the European People's Party and of the International Democrat Union.

1 History
2 Factions
3 E-mail spams
4 Leadership
5 See also
6 Related link

[edit] History

UMP was founded in 2002 from the merger of the Gaullist-conservative Rally for the Republic (Rassemblement pour la République, RPR), the conservative-liberal Liberal Democracy (Démocratie Libérale, DL), and a sizeable portion of the centrist Union for French Democracy (Union pour la Démocratie Française, UDF): many Christian Democrats (as Philippe Douste-Blazy and Jacques Barrot), the social-liberal Radical Party and the centrist Popular Party for French Democracy (both associate parties to UDF until 2002).

The party was thus born by the meeting of four major French political traditions: Gaullism, Liberalism (Republicanism), Christian Democracy (Popularism) and Radicalism.

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 (the UMP, as heir to the RPR, has seen a number of its members become increasingly embroiled in judicial proceedings arising out of the corruption scandals in the Paris region).

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In 2004 French regional elections the UMP suffered a heavy blow, losing 20 out of 22 regions in Metropolitan France and securing only half of the departments.

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.

As of 2006, Sarkozy is one of the leading contenders in the 2007 presidential election race.

[edit] Factions

[edit] E-mail spams

UMP is known for its extensive use of Internet advertisement possibilities, such as unsolicited emails. On 7 November 2005, various people [1] [2] discovered that the UMP had specified keywords such as banlieue ("suburbs") and racaille ("suburban scum") as triggers for their AdWords advertising on google.fr – a reference to the highly publicized civil unrest in 2005, which was concentrated in a number of "problem" suburbs. Nicolas Sarkozy, as Minister of the Interior, had front-line responsibility for dealing with these riots.