Valérie Pécresse is holding her first major presidential campaign meeting in Paris on Sunday, with the aim of revitalizing a campaign that is slipping and which has been put on the defensive in recent days.
While Emmanuel Macron remains monopolized by the diplomatic crisis around Ukraine, the LFI candidate Jean-Luc Mélenchon is gathering his support in Montpellier.
The candidate Les Républicains hopes for some 6,000 people at the Zenith. She should be alone on stage even if her speech, scheduled for around 3:00 p.m. to 3:30 p.m., will be preceded by videos from LR officials.
Determined to pose as an alternative to Emmanuel Macron, she will give “her vision of France, what she wants to build” we promise in her entourage, far from the catalog of measures which has earned her criticism in lack of incarnation .
This meeting is the first of magnitude for Valérie Pécresse, while her campaign is going through a false flat. She had to give up, due to the health crisis, on the date of December 11 initially planned by LR.
After taking off in the polls in early December in the wake of her inauguration, she lags far behind Emmanuel Macron, and in a pocket handkerchief with her far-right rivals Marine Le Pen and Eric Zemmour.
In a meeting on Saturday in the Morvan, Eric Zemmour reserved all his arrows for his rival LR, without even once mentioning the name of Marine Le Pen. The “right center” of Valérie Pécresse, he hammered, “will not be better than the left center of Emmanuel Macron”. And Eric Zemmour to urge voters to make the right choice in the first round “between saving the LRs or saving the nation”.
“I am the woman to be killed”, launches the candidate for the Journal du Dimanche. “All the blows are focused on me: those of Macronie like those of Éric Zemmour and Marine Le Pen. I am a political danger because I am the only one to embody a serious alternative to Emmanuel Macron. But I say it to anyone who shoots me in the back: I am a conqueror.”
– “Sunday we play big” –
Since her investiture, Valérie Pécresse has traveled relatively discreetly through France, distilling here a discourse on education, there measures on energy. “We are entering a new stage of this campaign on Sunday,” wants to convince those around him.
In this context, the post-meeting polls will be particularly scrutinized, less than two months from the first round.
“Sunday we play big because if it crashes, it will be hot internally,” says an elected LR.
In his entourage, we know that “it must be as personal a speech as possible”. “But she knows it, she is capable of it, she is never better than in adversity”, we add.
The candidate should arrive well prepared for this meeting, having cleared her agenda since Thursday.
The LR family will close ranks, despite the snakes swallowed upstream, in particular the defection of Eric Woerth on Wednesday, who left to support Emmanuel Macron following 40 years on the right, followed a few hours later by that of the mayor of Calais Natacha Bouchart.
Another grain of sand: Thursday Le Figaro echoed harsh remarks privately lent to Nicolas Sarkozy: “Valérie goes all over the place”, she has “understood nothing in the countryside” and “is non-existent”, or once more “there is no dynamics”.
Ms. Pécresse met the former head of state on Friday – who is however not expected at the Paris meeting.
For one of his biggest meetings, Jean-Luc Mélenchon will try in Montpellier to gather 6,000 people too, in front of whom he will decline his “plan for full employment”, published on Saturday. But whoever hopes to capture the vote of the working classes should also talk regarding the so-called “freedom” convoys, which marched in Paris on Saturday to protest once morest the vaccination pass and the rise in prices.
His competitor on the left Anne Hidalgo, still struggling with disastrous polls, continues for her part her trip to the Antilles. After a meeting in Basse-Terre (Guadeloupe) on Saturday, the PS candidate must visit a bay in Martinique affected by Sargassum.
