The candidate of the main right-wing party in the presidential election in France, Valérie Pécresse, in difficulty in the polls, promised a “new France” to the 7,500 people who came to attend her first major meeting in Paris on Sunday.
“We are here, together, to affirm, loud and clear, that the new France is coming,” said candidate LR, promising to bring “new hope” to a “reconciled” France.
This meeting was scrutinized given that Mme Pécresse, who is struggling to outrun his far-right rivals in the polls, had a lively week, with several rallies to President Emmanuel Macron, not yet an official candidate, and critical remarks lent to former right-wing president Nicolas Sarkozy this week.
It was time for the rally, and all the tenors on the right had made the trip, except Mr. Sarkozy.
In her speech of more than an hour, she was very firm on the sovereign, while the far-right candidate Éric Zemmour deemed her “not right-wing” on Saturday, vilifying the “overflowing immigration” which creates “zones of non-France”.
“We are at a crossroads”, but there is “no fatality, neither in the big replacement nor in the big downgrading”, affirmed Valérie Pécresse. “I defend the French identity, the real one. »
For candidate LR, the challenge was also to continue to impose the duel against Emmanuel Macron.
Quoting the historian Jules Michelet and the writer Charles Péguy, she defended wokism, which is “the opposite of the Republic”, and criticized Emmanuel Macron, who “gave in to repentance” vis-à-vis the former colonized and “racialized the issue of the suburbs”.
A rather solemn speech, which the candidate, regularly criticized for being too technocratic, wanted to humanize at the end, speaking of her childhood as a “teacher’s daughter” and her psychiatrist grandfather.
“I am this indomitable French woman” and “nothing will stop me”, she declared.