Union for a Popular Movement

The Union for a Popular Movement (Union pour un Mouvement Populaire), initially named the Union for the Presidential Majority (Union pour la Majorité Présidentielle), and more usually known from its French acronym as simply the UMP, is the main French conservative political party of the right-wing. It was founded in 2002 from the merger of the Rally for the Republic (Rassemblement pour la République, or RPR), Démocratie Libérale, and a sizeable portion of the Union for French Democracy (Union pour la Démocratie Française, better known as the UDF). The UMP is a member of the International Democrat Union.

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 former Finance Minister 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 UMP has an absolute majority in the lower house of the Parliament but relies on its reluctant junior partner, the UDF, in the Senate. However, it suffered a heavy blow in the 2004 French regional elections, losing 20 out of 22 regions in Metropolitan France and securing only half of the departments.

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). On 29 November 2004, Nicolas Sarkozy announced that he would officially take over the presidency of the UMP and resign his position as Minister of Finance, ending months of speculation. As of 2006, Sarkozy is one of the leading contenders in the 2007 presidential election race.

UMP is known for its extensive use of Internet advertisement possibilities, such as unsolicited emails. On 7 November 2005, various people [http://standblog.org/blog/2005/11/07/93114486-le-standblog-en-mode-degrade-et-quelques-liens discovered that the UMP had specified keywords such as banlieue ("suburbs") and racaille ("scum", especially "suburbs riff-raff") 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.

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