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Valérie Pécresse’s first major campaign gathering was meant to energise a sputtering presidential bid rattled by defections and self-doubt. Instead, it exposed a key weakness of a conservative candidate ill-suited to the raucous world of campaign rallies.
Five years after snatching defeat from the jaws of victory, have France’s conservatives once again backed the wrong horse in the race for the Elysée Palace?
This nagging question has come back to haunt the mainstream conservative Les Républicains party after a dreary week that began with a string of high-profile defections and ended with an underwhelming campaign rally at the Zenith concert hall in Paris on Sunday. Pécresse, who won a party primary in December, also suffered a humiliation this week when her former boss and conservative champion Nicolas Sarkozy savaged her campaign in private remarks that were leaked to the press.
Sarkozy, the last conservative to win a presidential election back in 2007, has notably refrained from lending Pécresse his support, reportedly irked by her failure to credit him on the campaign trail. Instead he offered her words of advice during a face-to-face meeting on Friday, which Pécresse described as “frank and warm”. So did François Fillon, the 2017 conservative frontrunner whose presidential run was fatally derailed by a “fake job” scandal involving payments to his wife.
According to Pécresse, both Sarkozy and Fillon told her: “Be yourself.”
But “herself” she clearly was not on Sunday as the normally mild-mannered Pécresse attempted to morph into a fiery orator before a crowd of more than…
Source : france24
