Valerie pecresse

Paris Perhaps the best thing that can be said about Valérie Pécresse’s presidential election campaign is that it’s better than the Socialist party’s. Which is to damn with faint praise. The French left are in such a dire state that if the opinion polls prove correct, their candidate, Anne Hidalgo, the mayor of Paris, won’t pass the 5 per cent mark in the first round required for candidates to recoup half their campaign costs. Pécresse has no worry on that score but she has failed to inspire the electorate since she was selected as the nominee for the centre-right Les Republicans (LR) in December. An opinion poll this week had

It seems like just minutes ago that Michel Barnier, former Brexit negotiator, centre-right Républicain exiled to Brussels two decades ago, was being widely touted (not least by British correspondents in Paris) as the respectable opposition to President Emmanuel Macron in the 2022 presidential election campaign. As I predicted here and here, he’s subsequently disappeared in a puff of smoke, finishing third in the party’s candidate selection. So meet Valérie Pécresse, 54, the somewhat surprisingly selected candidate of Les Républicains for president of France, and now in her turn being touted as the acceptable face of opposition. She’s certainly more credible than Barnier. Excited journalists inside the périphérique are reporting polls