Two months before the first round of the presidential election, Valérie Pécresse held her first major campaign rally at the Zenith in Paris this Sunday, February 13, in front of more than 7,500 people.
« I missed you ! » The LR candidate began her speech with thanks to elected officials and LR activists, her « French team ». Positioning himself as a direct opponent of Emmanuel Macron and Eric Zemmour, the polemicist neck and neck in the polls. The former Minister of Higher Education tried to galvanize her audience. « I call you with a start. Five years was too much. Ten years will be too late! » « Young people will suffer: for debts contracted within ten years, more than 30 years of reimbursement. »
“For ten years, our rulers have damaged France, we are at a crossroads. There is no fatality, neither to the great replacement, nor to the great downgrading. “I defend French identity, the real one, because France is not a nostalgia, it is an energy. To be French is not to resign oneself, it is to get up again. »
Valérie Pécresse then addressed the subject of climate change. « The whole challenge will be to decarbonize France without falling into decline. Ecology is a value, it is not an ideology. It is a solution, it is not a punishment » before pleading for the introduction of a carbon tax at Europe’s borders.
Valérie Pécresse proclaimed: « I want to make French people at heart, and not just French people on paper ». Earlier, she had cited, from the fourth minute of her speech, the racist and conspiracy theory of the « great replacement » – expressions directly from the register of the extreme right, first anti-Semitic, then xenophobic, we had not not heard the formula in meetings since the flights of Jean-Marie Le Pen.
From borders to immigration, there is only one step. Valérie Pécresse says she is ready to support the construction of walls, « as some states do. « I want us to fight together against immigration which leads to areas of non-France. If a country refuses to take back its illegal immigrants, it will be, with me, zero visa ». « I want to make French people in heart and not on paper. » « I want a France of order, because I want agree ».
The SOS-Racisme association also deemed the remarks of candidate LR on Monday « not worthy ». « The words of Valérie Pécresse are not worthy of a major contender for the presidency of the Republic », declared the president of SOS-Racisme, Dominique Sopo, quoted in a press release, regretting that the level of debate « collapses in mediocrity, irrationality and violence under the influence of the extreme right”. “Valérie Pécresse is wrong to want to give signs to a radicalized electorate, because this electorate is never satisfied enough with hatred. Also, it is known from the Christchurch attacks [in New Zealand, in 2019] that the Great Replacement Theory can lead to deadly consequences,” Sopo adds.
The candidate LR, trying to emphasize that in France the work is not paid, also brought back into debate the social minimum (RSA) so that each beneficiary performs at least 15 hours of work of general interest, in order to benefit from this survival aid. The more it goes into detail, the more it shifts right-wing politics towards the extreme right.
« No one will make me look down, no one should make us look down anymore. » Claiming her freedom, she quotes with emotion her godmother of heart Simone Veil then Nicolas Sarkozy. She praised « his audacity, his strength, his vision . He gave me this unique chance to be a minister and minister of the most explosive reform of the government ».
The candidate concluded her speech by calling on the French for national unity in the face of extremism, a barely concealed allusion to Eric Zemmour and Marine Le Pen. « Extremism lies to you, refuse the venom of nostalgia. Do not let anger and fear prevail, she claimed. I embody the France of national unity, they are disunity ». « We are here to say that the new France is coming, the eternal and new France which reconnects with this epic. I want this name of France to resonate again. Are you ready to launch yourself? To weather the storms? To raise the mountains? To rush to victory? I am, so follow me. »
Guest of RTL Monday morning, Valérie Pécresse assured that by using this term she had meant: « I do not resign myself precisely to the theories of Eric Zemmour and to the theories of the extreme right, because I know that a another way is possible. « That’s what I said yesterday and everyone makes me say the opposite, » she added. And to recall: “It is a sentence that I pronounced ten times in the primary, and all the commentators who take it up have periwinkle memories. During the second debate before the congress of the Republicans, in mid-November, Ms. Pécresse had, in fact, already used this formula in conclusion. “Tonight, after ten years of immobility, and bad choices, it is up to us to take back our destiny. I am convinced that we are condemned neither to the great downgrading nor to the great replacement, ”she said then.
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