“MMMM, A NICE baguette from the Ardennes!” declares Valérie Pécresse, tearing off a piece of the nice and cozy crusty loaf she has simply purchased at a boulangerie and popping it into her mouth. The centre-right Republicans’ presidential candidate, and head of the larger Paris area, has taken her marketing campaign to the valleys and forests of north-eastern France on a latest weekday. Within the village of Signy-l’Abbaye, no store or café goes unvisited. As Mrs Pécresse breezes out and in, clutching her loaf, some locals appear bemused. The supervisor at Le Gibergeon restaurant confesses beforehand to having no concept who the customer is, however is later charmed. “Oh sure, I recognised her from the telly,” she says. “It could be good to have a feminine présidente.”
After profitable her social gathering’s major in December, Mrs Pécresse recorded a ballot bump that made her probably the most critical contender in opposition to President Emmanuel Macron at France’s two-round election in April. Polls nonetheless recommend she would do about as nicely in opposition to the president in a run-off as would the nationalist-populist Marine Le Pen (although he's tipped to beat both), and significantly better than the far-right Eric Zemmour. But Mrs Pécresse’s first-round numbers have fallen, and her marketing campaign has stalled. On February thirteenth, at a glitzy rally in Paris, she put in a picket efficiency that was criticised even inside her camp. The clear hazard for Mrs Pécresse is that she is going to fail to make the run-off in any respect.
Out within the Ardennes, with its family-run dairy and cattle farms, locals listing their troubles: the value of petrol, the space to the closest hospital. Out and in the previous price range minister goes, stopping for espresso in a café and a beer in a bar. A graduate, like Mr Macron, of the Ecole Nationale d’Administration, France’s elite technocratic coaching school, Mrs Pécresse is nicely briefed, critical, and hard in debate. However she additionally is aware of find out how to pay attention. “She was self-confident, very attentive and listened lots,” says a retired lady within the village. Later, at a town-hall assembly in an industrial warehouse 25 kilometres (16 miles) away, a participant says: “She’s a lot nicer than she appears on the tv.”
Sensible, robust and good, nevertheless, is probably not sufficient. Mrs Pécresse is working into two difficulties as she seeks to turn out to be France’s first feminine president. The primary is that, on stage, she doesn't gentle up a room. After a day campaigning within the Ardennes, she heads for a rally within the city of Charleville-Mézières, the place Ms Le Pen topped first-round voting in 2017. Knowledgeable crowd-pumper chants “Valérie! Valérie!” because the candidate enters the corridor. A principally grey-haired viewers tentatively joins in. At her Paris rally, full of over 7,000 supporters, Mrs Pécresse gave a stilted efficiency. The following day she confessed to being “extra relaxed” in dialog.
The opposite is her political positioning. Mrs Pécresse instinctively belongs to the reasonable, pro-European centre-right and was as soon as seen as a possible recruit to Mr Macron’s authorities. But she secured her nomination by defeating Eric Ciotti, a celebration right-winger, within the major run-off. He embraces the “nice alternative” principle—adopted as a slogan globally by white supremacists—that overseas populations threaten to interchange the “indigenous” French. To attempt to hold this broad church collectively, Mrs Pécresse nods in Mr Ciotti’s path. At her Paris rally she deplored Mr Macron’s “failure” to forbid athletes from competing whereas carrying the Muslim scarf, and referred, albeit ambiguously, to alternative principle.
Mrs Pécresse denies that she has hardened her line, arguing that she has at all times been pleased with being on the suitable, and tracing her lineage to Jacques Chirac, a Gaullist former president and her mentor. She calls herself “two-thirds Merkel and one-third Thatcher”, and a feminist. “I understand how to be agency, but additionally find out how to maintain dialogue,” says Mrs Pécresse throughout a break on the Ardennes path, dismissing Mr Macron as “Blairite”, a “left-wing liberal” and a “candidate of the cities”. Her challenge, she insists, bears “no similarity to Macron’s”.
But many centre-right voters are confused. They're drawn to Mrs Pécresse’s fiscally prudent vow to curb public spending, which has soared underneath Mr Macron through the pandemic, in addition to to trim the 5.6m-strong French civil service by a internet 150,000 jobs and lift the state retirement age from 62 to 65 years. However such voters are delay by her nationalist tone on the necessity to “cease uncontrolled immigration”, and by her assaults on Mr Macron’s broader financial administration, which she calls “calamitous”. The financial system final 12 months grew at its quickest charge for half a century.
Amid these contradictions, Mrs Pécresse’s marketing campaign is fraying. In latest days she has misplaced Eric Woerth, the Republicans’ former price range minister, who now backs Mr Macron, as does Natacha Bouchart, the Republicans’ mayor of Calais. On the different excessive, Guillaume Peltier, a former social gathering vice-president, has give up for Mr Zemmour. Even Nicolas Sarkozy, the Republicans’ former president, has declined thus far to supply public help for la candidate.
Maybe voters simply discover it troublesome to narrate to Mrs Pécresse, who lives in Versailles and was privately educated within the swanky Paris suburb of Neuilly-sur-Seine. Her most rebellious second was the time she spent, relatively improbably, as an adolescent in Soviet youth summer time camps, after falling in love with Russian literature. To this present day, she will communicate the language. “I’ve at all times been very intrepid,” she says.
The danger for Mrs Pécresse is that she now loses momentum. Mr Zemmour has crept previous her in two new polls. When Mr Macron confirms his candidacy, which is predicted any day now, the marketing campaign dynamics could shift once more. “There’s been numerous criticism of Macron through the pandemic,” says a retired railway employee in Signy-l’Abbaye. “He’s smug, however he hasn’t managed issues too badly.”
Mrs Pécresse, in the meantime, is off once more on her marketing campaign “à la Chirac”, a candidate who delighted in rural French life. Leaving the boulangerie in Signy-l’Abbaye, she asks the baker the key of loaf. “You want persistence, you want time for the flavour to develop,” he replies. Time which, for Mrs Pécresse, could also be working out. ■
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