National Centre of Independents and Peasants
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The National Centre of Independents and Peasants (Centre National des Indépendants et Paysans, CNIP) is a liberal-conservative and conservative-liberal political party in France, founded in 1951 by the merger of the National Centre of Independents (the heir of the French Republican conservative-liberal tradition, so that many party members came from the Democratic Republican Alliance) with the Peasant Party and the Republican Party of Liberty.
It participated to the Third Force coalition, and took a major role in government at the beginning of the 1950s. In this, Antoine Pinay, its most popular figure, was Prime Minister in 1952, followed by Joseph Laniel in 1953-1954. It successfully elected René Coty as President of France in 1953. It declined after the Dien Bien Phu military disaster in Indochina in 1954.
In 1958, it supported Charles de Gaulle's comeback and approved the constitution of the Fifth Republic. Between 1958 and 1962 CNIP was the second largest political party and Antoine Pinay was Economy Minister until 1960. However, the party criticized the euro-scepticism of De Gaulle and the "presidentialisation". In 1962, it returned in opposition but the CNIP ministers, such Valéry Giscard d'Estaing, refused to leave the cabinet. They founded the Independent Republicans.
The party was defeated in the 1962 legislative election after 109 of its deputies voted against Georges Pompidou's government in a confidence vote on October 5, 1962. Besides, it participated, in vain, in the campaign against presidential election by universal suffrage.
In 1965, it merged with the Christian-democratic Popular Republican Movement to form the Democratic Centre. It became independent again after 1968, but it is a marginal conservative group (sometimes with far right tendencies, having gained members from the Parti des forces nouvelles), now associate party of the Union for a Popular Movement.
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