The Economist February 19th 2022 31
EuropeFranceThe Pécresse file
“M
mmm, a nicebaguette from the Ar
dennes!” declares Valérie Pécresse,
tearing off a chunk of the warm crusty loaf
she has just bought at a boulangerieand
popping it into her mouth. The centre
right Republicans’ presidential candidate,
and head of the greater Paris region, has
taken her campaign to the valleys and for
ests of northeastern France on a recent
weekday. In the village of Signyl’Abbaye,
no shop or café goes unvisited. As Mrs Pé
cresse breezes in and out, clutching her
loaf, some locals seem bemused. The man
ager at Le Gibergeon restaurant confesses
beforehand to having no idea who the visi
tor is, but is later charmed. “Oh yes, I recog
nised her from the telly,” she says. “It
would be good to have a female présidente.”
After winning her party’s primary in
December, Mrs Pécresse recorded a poll
bump that made her the most serious con
tender against President Emmanuel Mac
ron at France’s tworound election in April.
Polls still suggest she would do about as
well against the president in a runoff as
would the nationalistpopulist Marine Le
Pen (though he is tipped to beat either),and much better than the farright Eric
Zemmour. Yet Mrs Pécresse’s firstround
numbers have fallen, and her campaign
has stalled. On February 13th, at a glitzy ral
ly in Paris, she put in a wooden perfor
mance that was criticised even within her
camp. The clear danger for Mrs Pécresse is
that she will fail to make the runoff at all.
Out in the Ardennes, with its family
run dairy and cattle farms, locals list their
troubles: the price of petrol, the distance to
the nearest hospital. In and out the former
budget minister goes, stopping for coffee
in a café and a beer in a bar. A graduate, like
Mr Macron, of the Ecole Nationale d’Ad
ministration, France’s elite technocratic
training college, Mrs Pécresse is well
briefed, serious, and tough in debate. But
she also knows how to listen. “She wasselfconfident, very attentive and listened
a lot,” says a retired woman in the village.
Later, at a townhall meeting in an indus
trial warehouse 25 kilometres (16 miles)
away, a participant says: “She’s much nicer
than she seems on the television.”
Smart, tough and nice, however, may
not be enough. Mrs Pécresse is running in
to two difficulties as she seeks to become
France’s first female president. The first is
that, on stage, she does not light up a room.
After a day campaigning in the Ardennes,
she heads for a rally in the town of Charle
villeMézières, where Ms Le Pen topped
firstround voting in 2017. A professional
crowdpumper chants “Valérie! Valérie!” as
the candidate enters the hall. A mostly
greyhaired audience tentatively joins in.
At her Paris rally, packed with over 7,000
supporters, Mrs Pécresse gave a stilted per
formance. The next day she confessed to
being “more at ease” in conversation.
The other is her political positioning.
Mrs Pécresse instinctively belongs to the
moderate, proEuropean centreright and
was once seen as a potential recruit to Mr
Macron’s government. Yet she secured her
nomination by defeating Eric Ciotti, a par
ty rightwinger, in the primary runoff. He
embraces the “great replacement” theory—
adopted as a slogan globally by white su
premacists—that foreign populations
threaten to replace the “indigenous”
French. To try to keep this broad church to
gether, Mrs Pécresse nods in Mr Ciotti’s di
rection. At her Paris rally she deplored Mr
Macron’s “failure” to forbid athletes fromS IGNY-L’ABBAYE
The centre-right presidential hopeful is in trouble, but she fights on→Alsointhissection
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