The (small) surprise winner of the primaries of Les Républicains in France: Valéry Pécresse. For the first time in their history, the center-right party chose a female candidate to run in a presidential election. In the decisive, second round primary, she managed to beat the far-right candidate Eric Ciotti 61% to 39%. He was the real suprise coming in ahead of former EU chief negociator Michel Barnier and regional party heavy-weight Xavier Bertrand, who regularly polled best among the candidates of the Republican field as well as against President Macron in a possible presidential second round election duel.
The second place of Eric Ciotti in the Republican primary is a worrying sign because it tells you how far to the right Les Républicans have moved. Not so Republican anymore. Eric Ciotti repeatedly and openly declared to be ready to vote for the extreme-right candidate, the polemic writer and TV personality turned politician just in the last weeks: Eric Zemmour.
A brand new Elabe “Opinion 2022” poll for BFM TV and L’Express in collaboration with SFR, published today, puts Valéry Pécresse ahead of President Emmanuel Macron in a possible second round face-off in the French presidential election 2022.
Another poll published today by Ifop-Fiducial for LCI and Le Figaro put voter intentions for Emmanuel Macron at 25%, for Valérie Pécresse and Marine Le Pen both at 17%, for Eric Zemmour at 13% (margin of error: 1.4 to 3.1 points).
It is still a long way to go and plenty of things can happen, but one thing is sure: this election is far from over.
Biography of Valéry Pécresse
Back to the French Republican presidential candidate and her biography: Valéry Pécresse was born Valérie Anne Emilie Roux in the rich Paris region area of Neuilly-sur-Seine on July 14, 1967. She is the daughter of Catherine Bertagna and Dominique Roux, an economics professor and former president of the Bolloré Telecom company.
The Bolloré connection remains interesting until today. The current owner of the Bolloré group, Vincent Bolloré, controls an economic empire, including media such as Canal+, Vivendi and CNews (formerly (itélé). According to French specialists, on CNews, it was Vincent Bolloré himself who offered a tribune to the far-right polemist Eric Zemmour, who created a surprise in 2021 by rising to number three in the presidential polls, rivaling the other far-right candidate in the field, Marine Le Pen.
The world is small: Valéry Pécresse’s grandfather, Louis Bertagna, was not just a psychiatrist, catholic resistent to the collaborators around Pétain and to the Nazi occupation of France during the Second World War, who published on his grounds the illegal resistance newspaper Témoignage chrétien. He also treated French President Chirac’s daughter Laurence for anorexia (Le Nouvel Obs, July 9, 2011).
Valérie Pécresse is — like President Macron — a product of the French elite school system. She speaks French, English, Russian and Japanese. She got law degrees from both Hautes Etudes Commerciales (HEC) and Ecole Nationale d’Administration (ENA), before joining the Council of State in 1992 as an auditor-jurist. She rose through the ranks to become ‘master of inquests’.
In 1994, Valérie Pécresse married the former investment banker and Alstom manager Jérôme Pécresse. They have three boys together.
From 1995-98, Valérie Pécresse served as secretary general of AFP‘s oversight committee and as jurist on the Council of State’s Contentious Issues Board. She worked as an auditor at the Council of State, Government Commissioner, specializing in Internet law, laws in favour of people with disabilities and healthcare liabilities. Following the ill-conceived dissolution of parliament in 1997, which lost President Chirac his majority, she joined Jacques Chirac and became part of his cabinet at the Elysée as a technical advisor in charge of studies, foresight and information technologies. In 2000, she became Counselor for Technology and Information. Valérie Pecresse reportedly taught President Chirac how to use the Internet. She was involved in communications during Chirac’s 2002 reelection campaign. The same year, she was elected to the National Assembly (parliament) and subsequently served in the Assembly’s Law Commission. In 2004, she rose to the position of UMP spokesperson. She also participated in the creation of the UMP in 2002 alongside Jérôme Monod and Alain Juppé.
In 2002, for the first time, Valéry Pécresse was elected to the National Assembly for the Yvelines region. She specialized in matters relating to the family, education and research. She was involved in the functioning of the UMP as Deputy Secretary General in charge of research projects from 2002 to 2004, and as party spokesperson between 2004 and 2007.
Jacques Chirac took Valéry Pécresse under his wings and made her Minister of Higher Education and Research in the cabinet of Prime Minister François Fillon from 2007 until 2011. Her reform attempts lead to many strikes at the university level. But she kept going and pushed some reforms through.
Under President Sarkozy, from 2011 until 2012, Valérie Pécresse served as the government’s spokesperson and as Minister of Budget, Public Accounts and State Reform in Prime Minister François Fillon’s third cabinet. In this capacity, she opposed increases in the EU budget for 2013. At the Ministry of Finance, she ensured the historic reduction in 2011 of the deficit and public spending. She voted for the anti-relocation of VAT, which reduced labor costs, the key to job competitiveness. She was re-elected as Member of Parliament in her Yvelines constituency in 2007 and 2012.
In the 2011 local elections, Valéry Pécresse opposed the official party line, led by then UMP leader Jean-François Copé, not to recommend to the party’s supporters how to vote in the runoff-elections. Instead, she clearly said she would rather vote for Socialist Party (PS) members in the case of a runoff against candidates by the extreme-right Front National (FN; in 2018 renamed Rassemblement national, RN), led by Marine Le Pen.
First elected to the Île-de-France Regional Council in 2004, she took over the presidency in December 2015; Île-de-France is Europe’s most populous and economically strongest region. According to many observers, she has done a fine job managing the region until today.
Amid the Fillon affair, in March 2017, Valérie Pécresse joined Xavier Bertrand, Christian Estrosi and others in calling for Alain Juppé to replace François Fillon as the party’s candidate because the champion de probité turned out to be in conflict with the law (emplois fictifs, expensive gifts by businessmen, etc.).
In response to the Brexit vote in 2016, Pécresse helped launch an initiative of corporate leaders and politicians – including Paris Mayor Anne Hidalgo and others – to attract business, especially bankers, from London. She has since been saying publicly that France was rolling out the “red-white-and-blue carpet” for bankers from the City.
Ahead of the Republicans’ 2017 leadership elections, Valérie Pécresse left Les Républicains, which under their leader Laurent Wauquiez had moved to the far right, and founded her own political movement Libres! in July 2017. She rejoined Les Républicains ahead of the 2021 Republican primaries, which she won, as stated above.
In 2019, Valérie Pécresse announced plans to boost the number of people in the Paris region who cycle to work by investing 100 million euros in new cycle lanes and infrastructure, including a subsidized electric bike rental scheme.
On August 18, 2021 Valérie Pécresse told Le Point that she was “two-thirds Merkel, one-third Thatcher” («Je suis 2/3 Merkel et 1/3 Thatcher»). She positioned herself clearly as an economic reformer in favor of economic liberalism. Before and during her run in the Republican primary, she favored lower taxes for companies (baisse des impôts de production à concurrence des économies faites), the suppression of 200,000 jobs in the bureaucracy, while creating 50,000 new jobs for security, health care and education. In addition, she advocates the increase of net salaries by 10% to 2.2 times the minimum wage (SMIC) as well as to offer Euro 670.- per month for the youth in return for educational training/apprenticeships because 20% of the youth between 18 and 25 were unemployed and not in education and something had to be done, she said at the end of February 2021.
Valéry Pécresse could become a serious rival for Emmanuel Macron. On the economic and financial front, unlike Marine Le Pen or Eric Zemmour, she looks as competent as the current president. As a former budget minister, she points out to French weaknesses such as the public debt, the public deficit and the lack of a pension reform promised by Macron. Her rhetorical skills are as good as the current president’s. However, when it comes to societal matters, she is more conservatice than Emmanuel Macron. She had opposed gay marriage — like Angela Merkel in Germany — and stands for stronger laws against crime in crime-ridden communities.
After her primary win, Eric Zemmour and Marine Le Pen had immediately tried to attract Republicans who had voted for Eric Ciotti and his hard line. Christine Boutin, a former minister under Sarkozy and representing les Yvelines like Valérie Pécresse in the past, called her “Pécresse the traitor” (“Le surnom de Valérie Pécresse, c’est Pécresse la traîtresse”) and moved into the Zemmour camp.
Valérie Pécresse faces a tough job: keep the Ciotti voters while, at the same time, appealing to Macron and other centrist voters. And let’s not forget that there is still former prime minister Edouard Philippe with his brand new party Horizons, founded in October 2021, the most popular man on the center-right, before Pécresse won the primary. He does not want to run in 2022 but prepares the terrain for the subsquent presidential election. The field remains crowded. Only one can win the Elysée. And after the presidency, you have to win a majority in parliament.
Among her best assests is Patrick Stefanini, who once had worked for Chirac and then Fillon. He is an excellent organizer, and a man of ideas, e.g on immigration. His latest book: Immigration : ces réalités qu’on nous cache, Robert Laffont, November 2020, 330 pages (Amazon.fr). He was behind the massive influx of new — maybe many returning — Les Républicains party members ahead of the primaries; the numbers went up from 80,000 to 150,000. Probably many of them voted for Valérie Pécresse.
So far, the Jewish, far-right polemic writer and TV star Eric Zemmour has dominated the agenda with extreme-right themes such as immigration, identity and the fantasy of the “population exchange” (“grand remplacement”), the conspiracy theory that the elites want to replace Europe’s Christian population by (Muslim) immigrants.
Valérie Pécresse is a hard worker who can rival Macron’s intellectual level, unlike Marine Le Pen who cannot cannot count to three and Eric Zemmour who has read a lot but understand little and lacks executive and political experience altogether.
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Photograph of Valéry Pécresse (2019) by Jacques Paquier (cropped). Source: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Val%C3%A9rie_P%C3%A9cresse_-_(32605116257)_(cropped).jpg?uselang=fr + https://www.flickr.com/people/125671268@N02
Among the sources for this article are French newspapers, TV reports and discussions, the French Wikipedia entry and Wikileaks cables. Article added on December 7, 2021 at 19:49 Paris time. Added one sentence on December 8, 2021: “But she kept going and pushed some reforms through.”
