So she’s the candidate of the French Republican party—the erstwhile UMP/RPR, renamed Les Républicains six years back—who will compete with Emmanuel Macron, Marine Le Pen, Éric Zemmour et al in next April’s presidential election. Her victory over the hard rightist Éric Ciotti—whose views on immigration and Islam hardly differ from those of Le Pen and Zemmour—in the 2nd round of LR’s closed primary was pretty much a foregone conclusion after her somewhat unexpected qualification in Wednesday & Thursday’s 1st round (and Ciotti’s even more unexpected first place finish). LR, like its Republican counterpart across the pond, has been lurching right over the past decade and some but was not about to designate a candidate as reactionary as Ciotti, not this year at least.
Valérie Pécresse’s victory is a game-changer in the presidential race, as if she makes it to the 2nd round next April—which is entirely possible—she will stand a good chance of defeating Macron, thus becoming France’s first-ever Présidente de la République (and if, in some unlikely scenario, she faces off against Le Pen or Zemmour—or, in an even more unlikely scenario, against a candidate of the left—she will definitely be elected France’s first female president). Pécresse is a mainstream conservative of the Jacques Chirac variety (an endangered species in LR), who has been tacking right over the past several years—aligning with conservative Catholics on gay marriage and other such questions de société, adopting the stupid right-wing rhetoric on immigration, making even stupider pledges to shed 200,000 fonctionnaires—but whose governing reflexes are likely to be moderate. An American equivalent would maybe be Christine Todd Whitman, for those who remember her. And Pécresse is smart: she’s an énarque, after all (and her English is good, e.g. here, maybe better than Macron’s, and certainly Le Pen’s and Zemmour’s, who speak it poorly or not at all). I had an AWAV post on Pécresse in April 2011, when she was Sarkozy/Fillon’s minister of higher education, that was positive (perhaps a little too much so). I won’t vote for her (except to block Le Pen or Zemmour) but won’t have nightmares if she’s elected. I am frankly relieved that she’s LR’s candidate.
One person who merits a tip of the hat is LR president Christian Jacob, for having refused Éric Zemmour’s eventual participation in the party’s primary. If Zemmour had been a candidate along with Pécresse and the others, he would have attracted a flood of new members and definitely won, thus taking over the dominant party of the French parliamentary right, as did Trump with the US Republican Party. That would have been a disaster of the first order.
As for the left, the equation is simple: with Jean-Luc Mélenchon (LFI), Yannick Jadot (EELV), and Anne Hidalgo (PS) all polling in the single digits, they’re out of the picture. JLM will not repeat his feat of 2017 (19% in the 1st round), not a chance, and Hidalgo will be lucky to outperform Benoît Hamon’s 2017 score (6%). If Jadot’s poll numbers remain a few points higher than hers into February, she and the PS will be well advised to withdraw her candidacy and throw their support to Jadot, in return for a deal with the EELV in the June legislatives. As the combined score of the left is around 30%, that would push Jadot into the teens and with a possible shot at the 2nd round. Mais on n’en est pas là.
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