A right turn? Valérie Pécresse presented her “new France” project on Sunday during her first major campaign meeting at the Zenith in Paris. But the performance of the candidate Les Républicains was criticized on the form and on the substance. By taking up the terms of “great replacement” and “French paper”, the boss of the Ile-de-France region finds herself at the heart of a controversy. His opponents accuse him of using the words of Eric Zemmour and the National Rally to try to boost his campaign.
What did Valérie Pécresse say on Sunday?
For more than an hour, Valérie Pécresse was very firm on sovereign subjects, such as national identity, secularism or immigration. But the former budget minister surprised by the tone of her speech. There is “no fatality, neither to the great replacement, nor to the great downgrading”, she notably launched, evoking with ambiguity the thesis of the far-right writer Renaud Camus, “popularized” during this campaign by Eric Zemmour and refuted by specialists. In terms of immigration, the elected representative on the right has also proposed to build walls at the borders of Europe.
“I demand assimilation. I want to make French people at heart and not French people on paper, ”she also said. The candidate also targeted the wearing of the veil, evoking the debates on the headscarf in sports competitions. “For me, the veil is neither a garment like any other nor a religious prescription. It is a sign of female submission. Me President of the Republic, no woman will be submitted [….]. Marianne is not a veiled woman. »
What did his opponents say?
PS boss Olivier Faure announced on Monday on FranceInfo of his “stunned to see a candidate who calls herself a Republican take up the words and concepts of the extreme right”. Before denouncing a “permanent drift of the right”. At the National Rally, we see this as a sign of difficulty. “She is a candidate without compass. While she does not print the campaign, and she is accused of Islamodroitisme, she wanted to add to it. But she may talk about a great replacement, she is not credible on these subjects, “squeaks the RN executive Gilles Pennelle, while the theory is used
by some leaders of Marine Le Pen’s partybut not by the candidate herself.
Eric Zemmour had himself ironicized about this right-wing strategy of the candidate from Saturday during a meeting. “I say to those who want to vote Pécresse hoping to have a centrist Zemmour, a soft Zemmour, a light Zemmour. With her, you won’t have Zemmour. You won’t even get half a Zemmour. You will have a mask plastered over the face of technocracy. »
What do Valérie Pécresse and her supporters answer?
The person concerned explained this Monday morning on the terms of “great replacement”. “Today in France there are areas of non-France, but I am not resigned to this great replacement. But it’s something I’ve been saying for months, so I don’t even understand the controversy,” she said on RTL. During the LR primary in November, the candidate said she “hated this expression” but
had already used the Sunday formula during the second debate.
Eric Pauget, LR deputy for the Alpes Maritimes and early supporter, assumes a global change in tone. “There may be a change in semantics, but there is no change in substance or values. We want to talk about all subjects, without leaving aside certain taboos on the extreme right. So there is no right turn, but maybe stronger and firmer words to hit wider. »
The strategy of Valérie Pécresse may however surprise, because as early as 2017, the president of the Ile-de-France Regional Council had multiplied criticism against the line considered right-handed by the former president of LR, Laurent Wauquiez. Before leaving the party in June 2019.