Centrist will take the fight to Macron
The contest for the French presidency, which takes place in the early spring, began in earnest this week when the centre-right Republicans selected Valérie Pécresse, who heads the Île-de-France region around Paris, as their candidate, say Sarah White and Victor Mallet in the Financial Times. Pécresse, who easily beat National Assembly member Éric Ciotti in the final part of the primary, had surprised by beating better-known contenders Xavier Bertrand and Michel Barnier. She joins a growing list of candidates who have declared, including Marine Le Pen and Éric Zemmour on the right and Socialist Anne Hidalgo.
The rise of Pécresse has “thrown a spanner in the works” for Macron’s strategists, who had hoped that he’d be able to make “short work” of whoever emerged as the Republican candidate, says Charles Bremner in The Times. Polls are suggesting she will get enough votes to make the second round, pushing out Le Pen and Zemmour. If that happens, the second round would be a much tighter contest.
Pécresse says she wants to end the 35-hour working week, streamline the civil service and deport illegal aliens, says Gavin Mortimer in The Spectator. But if you look at her track record, she is a centrist and a “committed Europhile” who supported the European Constitution rejected by French voters in 2005, and whose idol is Angela Merkel. If anything she is even more prointegration than Macron, having previously argued that Britain must be “punished for Brexit”. If Macron and Pécresse make it to the second round, “all the electorate will need to decide is whether they want a centrist in a suit or one in a blouse”.