"By dint of telling everyone what they want to hear, the right has lost its soul - with the result that the French no longer really know what it stands for". On a number of policies, Mr Wauquiez has taken positions which put him clearly at odds with centrists within the party.
The notion that there is a division between Tea Partiers and centrists within the Republican Party is a fiction belied by the last five or six years of Republican Party politics.
Enzo Bianco (interior), Salvatore Cardinale (telecoms) and Sergio Mattarella (defence), all from the centrist alliance within the government known as "the Daisy", all wanted to run in Sicily.
Mr. Berlusconi's choice to lead the lower house, Pierferdinando Casini, who heads a small centrist Catholic Party within the center-right coalition, is likely to be approved on Thursday.
The influential centrist faction within the Democratic establishment that dominated during the Clinton administration is made up of relatively progressive economists and professional budget experts.
"He needed to extricate himself from Obama," said Jacob Heilbrunn, a journalist and scholar who has written extensively on GOP foreign policy and the decline of the centrist establishment within the party.
"The bulk of my nominees, twenty years ago or even ten years ago, would have been considered very much centrists, well within the mainstream of American jurisprudence, not particularly fire-breathing or ideologically driven," Obama said.
He is chair of the centrist think tank the Social Market Foundation and of the pressure group Straight Statistics.
The first, much reported beyond Israel, was opposition by centrists within his government, including Yair Lapid and Tzipi Livni, to the "Jewish nation" bill, which would have constrained the Supreme Court's ability to protect Arab citizens' rights.
The centrist parties within Israel's governing coalition are increasingly alarmed over Israel's growing isolation.
