Pécresse is currently President of the Regional Council of the capital region Île-de-France.
(Photo: dpa)
Paris In fact, Valérie Pécresse had already turned her back on the party for which she was running against incumbent Emmanuel Macron in the French presidential election in April. Pécresse was once education and budget minister under former President Nicolas Sarkozy. The bourgeois-conservative camp, which has renamed itself Les Républicains and has been waiting for a return to the Élysée Palace for almost ten years, drifted too far to the right in the opposition.
Pécresse drew the consequences: first, she founded a splinter group, and in the summer of 2019 she finally declared her departure from the party. It was only this October that Pécresse officially returned to the French Republicans – and on Saturday emerged as the surprise winner of the internal party vote on the presidential candidacy.
“The republican right is back,” said the president of the capital region Île-de-France. “Emmanuel Macron is only obsessed with pleasing. I’m obsessed with getting things done. “
For the first time, the party family, which is in the tradition of long-time heads of state Charles de Gaulle and Jacques Chirac, has appointed a woman for the presidency. Pécresse describes himself as “two thirds Angela Merkel and one third Margaret Thatcher”. However, nothing has changed in the conservatives’ shift to the right, against which they protested a few years ago. On the contrary: the dividing line with right-wing populists in the debates about immigration, security and national identity has become rather thinner in recent months.
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Can Pécresse even succeed in the balancing act of covering the flank to the far right and at the same time bringing back the middle-class voters in the center from Macron? The nomination of the 54-year-olds was anything but foreseeable. It was not even considered certain that she would make it to the runoff election in the online vote lasting several days. The party still resents Pécresse for having left the party in 2019.
Candidates brought tons of supporters with them
The grassroots and officials also harbored these reservations about Xavier Bertrand: The president of the Hauts-de-France region in northern France had also decided to revise his departure from the party in time for the candidate selection.
Pécresse and Bertrand smuggled in masses of supporters in recent months, and the number of party members entitled to vote rose from around 80,000 in September to almost 150,000 in mid-November. In doing so, they undermined support for the former EU Commissioner and European Brexit negotiator, Michel Barnier, who was considered a favorite of the Republican establishment not least because of his loyalty.
Barnier’s presidential ambitions electrified observers in Brussels and in other European countries. At home, on the other hand, surveys indicated that people could not do much with the 70-year-old. In the party’s internal preselection, Barnier was eliminated in the first round last week, as was Bertrand, who was favored by opinion polls.
Instead, Pécresse and MEP Eric Ciotti, who is on the far right of the Republicans, made it into the runoff election. Barnier and Bertrand then called on their supporters to vote for Pécresse, and in the final duel they won with a clear majority of 61 percent.
Pécresse has headed the government of the economically strongest region in France, the greater Paris area with twelve million inhabitants, since 2015. Even if the competencies of the regional presidents are limited and cannot be compared with the prime minister of a German federal state, it is an office that gives them weight. As education minister, she reformed the country’s university system, despite violent protests from students and teachers.
Republicans are also involved in migration policy
The promise of reform is also part of her program for the presidential election campaign: “Our country is brimming with talent and energy,” she said after her nomination. Pécresse promises to cut red tape and reform the pension system. At these moments she almost sounds like Macron, who is also aiming for re-election with an economic reform agenda.
The Republican supporters, however, seem to be at least as concerned about other issues. This can be seen in the performance of Ciotti, which initially hardly anyone had on the list. Then the MP from Nice in the south of France was suddenly at the top of the list of applicants in the first ballot. The outsider had struck particularly harsh tones in the televised debates of the presidential candidates on migration policy.
Pécresse also calls for immigration to be restricted. Ciotti’s remarks were more reminiscent of the right-wing populist Marine Le Pen and the Islamophobic publicist Éric Zemmour, who are competing for the votes of the far right in the presidential election.
Le Pen immediately tried to portray Pécresse as the female version of the incumbent president. The graduate of the elite ENA university has “almost exactly the same profile as Emmanuel Macron” and “the same positions on a considerable number of issues,” she said – and called on “disappointed supporters” of the Republicans to vote for their party.
A good four months before the presidential election, Macron is clearly ahead in the polls, followed by Le Pen. This constellation in the runoff would be a new version of the 2017 duel. Before her nomination, pollsters saw Pécresse only at around ten percent. The leader of the Les Républicains parliamentary group in the National Assembly, Damien Abad, summed up the challenge for his party over the next few months on Saturday: “Now it will be a matter of paving the way for us between Macronism and the extremes.”
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