As names go, "union for a presidential Majority" was too baldly utilitarian for the fractious alliance of conservative parties cobbled together to secure President Jacques Chirac's victory in the May 2002 election. But when the party later opted to keep the initials — ump — but change the name to Union for a Popular Movement, the idea certainly wasn't to launch a popular movement against the President himself. Lately, however, it's beginning to seem that way.

Ever since the French right was slaughtered in March 28 regional elections, frustration within the ump has been deep — and its founding father has taken a lot of the heat. Chirac's long hold on the right is finally being challenged by a younger generation eager for change. "We're seeing the seeds of the end of the Chirac era," says Dominique Reynié, director of the Interregional Observatory of Politics in Paris. "Part of that is the emancipation of the party."

Last month the party pronounced its flat-out opposition to Turkey's membership of the European Union; Chirac has said Turkey will eventually join. This month the party called for a referendum on the European Constitution, undermining Chirac's craftier stance of waiting until

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nginx/1.14.0 (Ubuntu) the text is fixed — perhaps at the European Council meeting in June — before deciding to have it ratified by Parliament or take the larger risk of submitting it to the public. And as if opposition from his own team wasn't enough, last week the European Commission announced it would put the E.U.'s €3 billion in agricultural export credits on the negotiating table to jump-start stalled global trade talks. The credits are sacrosanct in France, the largest recipient of such aid, and even more so to Chirac, who has made the defense of France's farmers an anchor of his political career.

Chirac tried to stanch the wounds last week by issuing an unprecedented call to order to his troops in the National Assembly. "The role of majority parliamentarians is to support the government with loyalty and warn it with candor," he told a gathering of them. The professorial tone elicited a round of offended sputterings from Deputies — many of them anonymous — in the French press.

Some of the loudest critiques came from the adherents of one conservative pretender to the French presidency, Finance and Economic Minister Nicolas Sarkozy. The political spitfire's frank desire for Chirac's job, next up in 2007, may reek of lèse-majesté to the President and his camp, but that hasn't impeded Sarkozy's growing influence in the party. After a strong performance as a law-and-order Interior Minister, he emerged from the debacle of the regional elections with the crucial economic portfolio, further cementing his reputation as the man to beat. Sarkozy may well run for the presidency of the party at its next general convention in November.

If he doesn't run, he'll certainly put up a "sarkoziste" for that post, running against a Chirac loyalist. And that doesn't begin to exhaust the currents within the ump. Nicolas Dupont-Aignan, 43, for example, says he wants to lead the party back to its Gaullist roots. "The President's positions on the constitution and on Turkey are untenable — the party doesn't want to go with him," he says. "We need to put France first."

Many younger conservatives, though, can't embrace those ideas. Polls show them to be far more economically liberal and comfortable with the E.U. than Chirac's generation. "The ump is no longer a Gaullist party," says Reynié. "The younger generation has grown up amid the crisis of the French model, and they're not as attached to the state." Florian Guingrich, 22, head of the ump youth group in Avignon, complains about a party that talks but doesn't listen, that wants to decentralize France but is itself centralized. "We can't win if the party's organized from the top down," he says. "That's why the referendum on the constitution is key: you can't make Europe unless the people want it."

Such chatter has contributed to a certain fin de règne feeling in Paris, even though Chirac has another three years in office. But reports of Chirac's political demise would be premature. Figures released last week show the French economy grew faster in the first quarter than it has since early 2002; if the trend persists, growth would reach 3.2% this year — and the conservatives will claim that France has been doing something right after all. That would give Chirac and Sarkozy the chance to fight over who gets the credit — as a proxy for the real battle over who becomes the next President.

• JAMES GRAFF | Paris
• Chirac faces a rebellion in the ranks