Valérie Pécresse, LR president of the Île-de-France region and candidate for the 2022 presidential election, was the guest of “Presidential Matins” from franceinfo, Monday January 10.
>>> Safety, economy, energy … What to remember from the interview with Valérie Pécresse on franceinfo
Franceinfo’s True du False cell scrutinized the two-hour interview and verified five statements made by the candidate.
1“Sentences of less than a year are almost systematically adjusted. They are no longer carried out.”
This is rather wrong. Valérie Pécresse’s statement is rather false. The sentence adjustment of which the candidate speaks does exist and provides that sentences of less than six months must be adjusted and sentences between 6 and 12 months may be,
but it is not necessarily automatic. If the court or the sentence enforcement judge considers that the conditions for a modification of the sentence are not met, for example if the convicted person does not have a home, he will have to serve his sentence in prison.
If we look at the latest figures from the Prison Administration, published last October, we can read that of the approximately 47,000 prisoners currently sentenced in French prisons, a little over 12,000 received a sentence of less than ‘one year in prison. That is to say more than a quarter of inmates behind bars at the moment.
2“We have practically a quarter of inmates in French prisons who are foreigners”
It’s true. At the last count of the Prison Administration, there were 17,095 foreign prisoners detained on October 1. This represents 24.71% of all prisoners while foreigners only represent 7% of the French population. To contextualize this figure, we must also take into account the fact that foreigners are more often sentenced to prison than other litigants.
> To read also: Are foreigners over-represented in prison?
3“More than half of the En Marche group did not vote for the vaccination pass”
It’s wrong. While some of the Les Républicains deputies did not follow the instructions of Valérie Pécresse, in favor of the vaccination pass, the candidate LR affirmed that the president “also has its slingers” by asserting that “more than half of the En Marche group did not vote for the vaccine pass (…) while 80% of the Republicans deputies were not opposed to this text”.
In her calculation, Valérie Pécresse takes into account the deputies who did not vote. According to the figures of the National Assembly, we see that within the group La République en Marche, the participation rate was 51%. Of those who voted, they voted in favor, over 97%. If we remove the absent members, there were only three against and one abstention. On the other hand, if we now look at the side of the Les Républicains group,
attendance was 72%. Among them, 38% voted for, 32% against, 30% abstained. Clearly, the LR group was the most divided during this vote in the Assembly.
4“Unfortunately, we have more and more young people dropping out (at school) and dropping out from the sixth grade”
This is rather wrong. According to the figures of the 2021 report “Repères et references statistics” (RERS), the share of “early leavers” from the school system fell from 9.2% in 2015 to 8% in 2020. A figure respecting the objective set by the European Union: that early exits represent less than 10% of 18-24 year olds by 2020. On average, between 2017 and 2019, 743,000 young French people left initial training. 12% of them left with the patent or no diploma according to the RERS report. The same report specifies that the share of students leaving secondary education at college, CAP or BEP level, graduates or not, rose from 7.9% in 2009 to 5.4% 10 years later. More generally, most of the indicators measuring early school leaving have been declining for several years, indicates the summary of the National Center for the Evaluation of the School System (Cnesco).
5“Emmanuel Macron closed Fessenheim, and today he is reopening coal-fired power stations”
It’s wrong … but with a little truth. The Fessenheim nuclear power plant effectively closed during Emmanuel Macron’s five-year term, in June 2020, when it was the oldest plant in France. On the other hand, it is wrong to say that coal-fired power stations have reopened. The two plants of this type, Saint-Avold (Moselle) and Cordemais (Loire-Atlantique), currently produce electricity because the nuclear fleet does not provide enough. However, it is not because of the closure of Fessenheim that nuclear production is insufficient. These coal-fired power stations, which must close in the more or less long term, continue to operate because 12 nuclear reactors are shut down at the start of the year, or 20% of the French fleet. Two power plants, Civaux (Vienne) and Chooz (Ardennes) are completely shut down for faults in their cooling circuit, which represents four reactors less. In addition, eight reactors are also shut down for maintenance at four other nuclear power plants. Fessenheim, for the record, only had two reactors.