Is Valérie Pécresse the Theresa May of French politics?

On Sunday, the hitherto lacklustre campaign of France’s centre-Right presidential candidate, Valérie Pécresse, is meant to catch fire. She has taken the risk of hiring the 9,000-seat Zenith concert hall in Paris.

So far she has failed to make a breakthrough. The French want their politicians to be capable of making big speeches. They are not interested in the Boris Johnson joke-a-minute style or vivid tabloid metaphors, and are flattered if they are made to think. Above all, France wants its contenders for the nation’s supreme office to be convincing orators. But Mme Pécresse’s speeches have failed to convince either France’s opinion-forming class or other politicians, still less French voters.

Valérie Pécresse is an accomplished politician: a minister under Nicolas Sarkozy, 2007-12, ticking all the boxes of the hautes écoles system of mandarin education which prepares most of the French elites in business, state administration, and politics. She is married to the CEO of the Paris branch of General Electric, which is a key player in France’s nuclear industry. She speaks passable Russian, but so far is staying out of the Kremlin-Ukraine spat. Doubtless she is hoping that the high-profile interventions of President Macron will fail and he will fall flat on his face — a wish devoutly shared by most Anglo-American commentators.

The French Right does not share the Russophobia of the Right in many other Western countries. France has never quite forgiven America for arriving twice on French soil in the 20th century to save both France and Europe from German domination. Soon after the liberation, General de Gaulle hurried to Moscow in December 1944, seeking a Franco-Soviet understanding independently of Washington and London.

As in Britain, however, no voter appears to be moved by what any leader is saying on the Ukraine issue. So Mme Pécresse is probably wise to stay out of the fur Chapka diplomacy practised in Moscow by Britain’s intrepid Foreign Secretary, Liz Truss.

Pécresse’s problem is that she has said nothing to set the election alight. With no-one showing much interest in her, she is in danger of becoming the Theresa May of the French election.

Like the Tories in Britain, Les Républicains are the French centre-Right party, the successor to the Gaullist and Chirac-Sarkozy RPR. When in early December she won her party’s nomination by just 1,000 member votes — beating Michel Barnier, among others — she enjoyed an immediate surge in the polls to 20 per cent.

There was much excitement about France having its first woman president, a mass-going Catholic. But as with Theresa May in the 2017 election, the more France has seen of Valérie Pécresse, the more bored they have become. In most polls this year she is just below Marine Le Pen.

It only needs a few of Éric Zemmour’s supporters to decide that he is unelectable and therefore they should ensure that the other hard-rightist, Marine Le Pen, should go into the second round in the first of the two elections on 10th April. If that happens, the Pécresse campaign is over. And as in Britain, Germany, Spain or Italy, 20th century post-1945 centre-Right conservatism or Christian democracy is now history. The Right has mostly swerved into the identity politics of nationalism, hostility to Europe with a helping of xenophobia and hostility especially to Muslims.

Like Lady May, Mme Pécresse is perfectly polished and fluent in her words. Both are devout Christians and exude middle-class competence, but there is no spark. Almost on the eve of her big Paris meeting, Eric Woerth, one of the most senior of Chirac-Sarkozy era ministers, who still chairs the French National Assembly’s powerful Finance Committee, came out to endorse Emmanuel Macron’s re-election. This is a snub for Mme Pécresse.

Many are critical of her choice of campaign manager, Patrick Stefanini, a veteran of the Jacques Chirac era nearly three decades ago. Stefanini also ran the disastrous campaign of François Fillon in 2017, which opened the doors of the Élysée to Macron. Stefanini was also sentenced to a year’s imprisonment in 2004 over fake jobs in the Paris town hall, a corrupt fiddle used by the French right to channel taxpayers’ money to pay for party political work.

The prison sentence was suspended, but many question Pécresse’s choice of Stefanini as the man to ensure she defeats Macron. One of them is her former boss, Nicolas Sarkozy, the last centre-Right President in France — now serving a year’s jail sentence for fraud but allowed free with an electronic tag.

In Figaro, France’s Daily Telegraph, Sarkozy is quoted as saying: “Valérie is all over the place. In a campaign if you manage to implant one or two ideas in voters’ heads that is already a miracle. You have keep hammering home key points. In 2007, people were talking of Sarko morning, noon and night. But who ever mentions Valérie Pécresse. She doesn’t exist.”

If Macron enters the second round facing Marine Le Pen, it is possible that Sarkozy and maybe even François Hollande, the Socialist president of France 2012-2017, could make clear that Macron should stay in the Élysée rather than risk France falling into the hands of the Europhobic, racist far-Right.

On Sunday night Valérie Pécresse has a chance to set her campaign on fire and enthuse the majority of the French, many of  whom do not like their pushy, domineering, ex-banker technocratic President. She must convince them that she is the woman to take over. If she cannot, stand by for a second five years of Emmanuel Macron leading France and being the dominant politician in Europe.

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