Valérie Pécresse triumphs over France’s centre-right

In the end, it was a crushing victory. Valérie Pécresse, the posh girl from Neuilly-sur-Seine, the most exclusive address in France, is to be the candidate for the centre-right Républicains in next April’s presidential elections. 

By 61 per cent to 39 per cent of the votes cast at a special party congress, she saw off Éric Ciotti, a pretender from a mountain village next to the Italian frontier, becoming the first woman to contest the presidency from the conservative right and the most likely to defeat the embattled encumbent, Emmanuel Macron. 

Macron is not stupid. He knows now that he has a fight on his hands. Until Thursday, when Ciotti and Pécresse came out on top against the presumed favourites, Xavier Bertrand and Michel Barnier, in round one of the party vote, the President was confident that the Right would not lay a glove on him come April 10. Pécresse’s triumph has changed all such reckoning. She has gone from dark horse to blonde bombshell in just two rounds of the Republicain’s votes. 

Pécresse, aged 54, whose father, Dominique Roux, was for seven years CEO of the French multinational Bolloré, may have been born with a silver spoon in her mouth, but she went on to be not just a highly successful lawyer, speaking five languages, including Japanese, but President of the Île de France, the nation’s richest and most powerful region, centred on Paris.

The threat she poses to the Jupiter President is greater than anything he has previously experienced.  

Speaking after the vote, dressed in her trademark scarlet jacket and white top, Pécresse issued her rallying cry, La Droite Républicain est de Rétour – “The Republican Right is Back”. In doing so, she sought to put an end to the confusion that has gripped conservatives in recent years as they struggled with the legacy left by their 2017 presidential hopeful François Fillon – convicted with his wife of the embezzlement of state funds – and the phenomenon of Macron’s ad hoc political creation, La République en Marche. 

Pécresse has a plan. She is going all-in, on the economy, Covid, Islam, immigration, education, Europe, foreign relations, industrial growth, most of all, perhaps, the need for administrative and public sector reform. As bright as Macron, who has traded for years on his reputation as the cleverest man in politics, she will take him on without fear or favour in the debates on which the elections are expected to turn. 

Will she, in her turn, trade on her gender? Of course. She is blonde and good looking, with the classic dress sense that marks out almost all women who enter the political arena in France. She was picked out early by Nicolas Sarkozy, appointed first as his minister of higher education, then as his communications chief and the face of his administration. 

But she wasted no time in the years that followed, during which the hapless Socialist François Hollande stumbled from one disaster to the next. Astutely switching her attention to the capital region, she secured election to the leadership of the île de France, with its 12.25 million people, accounting for close to one third of national gdp. 

Politically, she is solidly on the right of her party, which is now dominant. She will campaign for strict curbs on third-world immigration and a clampdown on all forms of Muslim extremism. It is even possible that she may resurrect her scheme to bring the Gendarmerie Nationale under the direction of a newly-created ministry with distinct echoes of the Department of Homeland Security in the US. 

Unlike Macron, she regards Brexit as a done deal, and something of a distraction – though this is unlikely to prevent her from supporting Brussels in its approach, suitably amended, to the Northern Ireland Protocol. She could be expected to turn over a fresh page with the UK, but, like Macron, would hope to engage with Boris Johnson in serious, not clown mode. 

Happily married, to the banker and industrialist Jérome Pécresse, and with three teenage children, she has little enthusiasm for either same-sex marriage or transgender rights, but will be too focused on issues higher up her agenda to spend time arguing the toss with the LGBT lobby.  

To her right, Marine Le Pen and Éric Zemmour will be shaking in their shoes at least as much as Emmanuel Macron. Pécresse speaks her mind and is sure to be a persuasive, no-nonsense candidate with a gift for bringing home the popular vote while reassuring the bourgoisie that she has their interests very much at heart. 

If Macron and Pécresse can see off Le Pen and Zemmour on April 10, and provided Anne Hidalgo does not come up with a shock Macroniste miracle on the left, the run-off on April 24 should be the most exciting, and nail-biting, contest in years.