When she describes the previous primary battle five years ago among France’s centre-right politicians, Valérie Pécresse recalls the proverb used by one of those in the losing camp: “If two dogs are fighting for a bone, it’s the third dog that shows up and wins the bone.”
Pécresse herself has just pulled off the same trick in the latest primary among members of the country’s Les Républicains party, defeating favourites such as Michel Barnier, the EU’s former Brexit negotiator, to win the nomination as candidate for next year’s presidential election.
The 54-year-old career politician, currently the elected leader of the Ile-de-France region that includes Paris, now stands a good chance of thwarting Emmanuel Macron’s re-election bid in April and becoming France’s first woman president.
“For the first time in its history, the party of General de Gaulle, of Georges Pompidou, of Jacques Chirac and Nicolas Sarkozy will have a female candidate to run for the presidential election,” Pécresse told cheering supporters in Paris last weekend. She describes herself as “two-thirds [Angela] Merkel and one-third [Margaret] Thatcher” and says she gets things done. “My opponents call me the Iron Lady,” she told the Financial Times this year.
“I think she’ll be a really serious challenger,” says a friend who has known her since university days. “She’s a relentlessly hard worker and has been a formidable minister.”
Sarkozy, whom she served as minister for higher education and the budget, also praised her diligence, saying he only wished she could have been “a bit more fun”. But the latest opinion polls indicate that Pécresse was a wise choice for the centre-right.
According to a poll of voting intentions from Elabe for BFM TV, L’Express and SFR, she would defeat far-right contenders such as Marine Le Pen and Eric Zemmour and garner 20 per cent of first-round votes, qualifying her for the second round against Macron on 23 per cent. More significantly, the poll suggests she would go on to defeat the president in the runoff by 52 per cent to 48. “It’s the first time any published poll has Emmanuel Macron losing,” Elabe said.
“She’s very often been underestimated,” says Vincent Martigny, a politics professor at the University of Nice. “She’s very determined, very motivated, a hard worker, she has got a lot of ministerial experience and she’s been leading the most important region of France.”
She will not have an easy campaign, however. Married with three children, Pécresse is depicted by her political enemies as a comfortable, Roman Catholic bourgeoise based in the prosperous western suburbs of Paris in a country where voters supposedly appreciate provincial roots — although she has taken pains to emphasise her Corsican and southern origins and to point out that the region she runs has some of the toughest quartiers in France.
Pécresse has learnt Russian and Japanese as well as English and is also a graduate of two of France’s top institutions, HEC Paris (the Ecole des hautes études commerciales), and — like Macron — of ENA (the Ecole Nationale d’Administration). “She is the quintessence of the French elite,” says Martigny.
She also risks being dragged into uncomfortable political territory by her party — which moved so sharply to the right that she temporarily abandoned it in 2019 — and by the pugnacious mood among white voters whose antipathy to Muslim immigrants and demand for draconian law and order measures have been stoked by Le Pen and Zemmour.
Her proposal, revived in this campaign, to double sentences for serious crimes committed in difficult suburbs where the police are often in danger was greeted with puzzlement by some critics. They noted that she had long taught constitutional law and been a member of the Council of State and should have known that it was unconstitutional to discriminate in this way.
Pécresse is a moderate by the increasingly conservative standards of the LR, but her hardline stance on law and order and her commitment to economic reform and fiscal orthodoxy will play well on the French right.
She has accused Macron of “raiding the till” to splash out taxpayers’ money during the pandemic, and has vowed that she will cut 200,000 administrative jobs from the country’s bloated civil service — something Macron promised but has failed to do during his five years in office.
“Emmanuel Macron has only one obsession — to please (plaire). I have only one obsession — to act (faire),” she told her supporters in a rhyming critique of what she sees as the incumbent president’s lack of commitment to the hard reforms that France needs.
Macron, who came to power declaring that he was “neither right nor left”, had no trouble demolishing Marine Le Pen, leader of the far-right Rassemblement National, in a televised debate before the final round of the previous presidential election in 2017, and he would have been comfortable facing Le Pen again this time.
Pécresse, politically the closest to Macron of all his main rivals for 2022, is another matter. She knows her history and economics as well as he does and has a solid record in government. Pécresse’s friend of three decades says: “Faced with a competent woman, I don’t see Macron being very comfortable.”
Valérie Pécresse, the woman who could beat Macron
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