ABSTRACT
The French citizens living abroad benefit from the largest political representation in their home country of any expatriate community in the world, with 443 ‘local’ consular councillors, a representative Assembly of French Citizens Abroad, 12 senators and 11 deputies. The development of such a large special representation has favoured the emergence of an ‘extra-territorial French political space’. In recent years, all the major French political parties have strived to extend their structure abroad. Emmanuel Macron’s newly created party, La République En Marche (LREM), is no exception. Few weeks after its creation, it settled “local committees” in foreign countries in view of the 2017 presidential and parliamentary elections. Such a strategy proved to be very successful, since LREM won 10 of the 11 mandates of deputy. Through the study of the development and functioning of LREM abroad, the purpose of this chapter is to get a better understanding of how it has managed to impose itself as the dominant party in the ‘extra-territorial French political space’ during the 2017 elections. The analysis is based on original empirical research and pays specific attention to the interactions between local committees abroad and the national leadership of the party in France.
