Faced with two far-right rivals eating into her electorate, Valérie Pécresse, the newly appointed candidate hoping to lead France’s conservative Les Républicains to a presidential victory next year, has her work cut out even to scrape a place in the second-round run-off vote.
But Pécresse’s triumph in a party primary on Saturday — confounding predictions about the favourites, which included the EU’s former chief Brexit negotiator Michel Barnier — could change the course of the campaign and potentially dent Emmanuel Macron’s chances of an easy re-election in April.
A former minister for higher education and for the budget under Nicolas Sarkozy, and since 2015 head of the Île-de-France region that includes Paris, Pécresse has years of government experience. Analysts say her policies — tough on law and order and strong on fiscal discipline — could strike a chord with some of the more moderate conservative voters who flocked to Macron’s centrist, reformist platform in 2017.