the Representative Council of Jewish Institutions of France (CRIF), Richard Prasquier, called Jacob's comments "a very great clumsiness". In 2012, he was re-elected in the first round with 117 votes, ahead of Xavier Bertrand (63 votes) and Hervé Gaymard (17 votes). In the UMP's 2012 leadership primaries, he endorsed Copé. Under Jacob's leadership, the UMP (and later LR) parliamentary group asked for several votes of no-confidence in the government of Prime Minister Manuel Valls in 2014, 2015 and 2016. In the Republicans' 2016 presidential primaries, Jacob endorsed Nicolas Sarkozy as the party's candidate for the office of President of France; the party's majority, however, voted for François Fillon to run in the 2017 presidential election. In March 2017, when the Fillon affair led several staff members to leave the presidential candidate's campaign team, Jacob was appointed campaign coordinator, in tandem with Bruno Retailleau. Following the legislative elections in June 2017, Jacob was re-elected chairman of the LR parliamentary group, in a vote against Damien Abad. In addition, he has since been serving on the Defence Committee and the Committee on Sustainable Development and Spatial Planning again. In the Republicans' 2017 leadership election, Jacob endorsed Laurent Wauquiez. Under Jacob's leadership, the Republicans' parliamentary group asked for a vote of no-confidence in the government of Prime Minister Édouard Philippe over the Benalla affair in 2018. In October 2019, after Wauquiez's resignation and in the context of a series of electoral losses, Jacob emerged as a consensus candidate for the LR leadership. In an internal party vote, he won against Julien Aubert and Guillaume Larrivé. Damien Abad succeeded him as leader of the LR parliamentary group. Under Jacob's leadership, LR won more than half of the country's small towns in the 2020 French municipal elections; at the same time, however, the party lost in larger cities it had held for decades, including Marseille and Bordeaux. By 2021, Jacob said he had "no ambition" to campaign for the 2022 French presidential election. At the Republicans' national convention in December 2021, he chaired the 11-member committee which oversaw the party's selection of its candidate for the elections. Political positions Foreign policy When President François Hollande and the French government sought to bolster the case for military action against President Bashar al-Assad's government amid the Syrian civil war in 2013, Jacob held that an intervention "could only be justified in the framework of the United Nations"