Reunion operation for Valérie Pécresse and Laurent Wauquiez, who displayed their unity on Friday in Haute-Loire to “win together” the presidential election, and turn their backs on the past while the Republican candidate puts the fight against insecurity at the heart of her countryside.
“Welcoming him here is a symbol of my support and my total commitment alongside Valérie”, assured the president of the Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes region, in the small town of Dunières.
“I will be totally committed alongside him in this campaign because it is the only thing that interests me”, he added, recalling: “the stake for us is the presidential election”.
“We will win together, I’m telling you,” assured Valérie Pécresse, welcoming “a great regional president”. Laurent Wauquiez will have “a pillar role” in his campaign at the head of the support committee for elected officials, she added in front of a swarm of cameras eager to immortalize these images of harmony.
Mr. Wauquiez had already promised his commitment in an interview in December. But this is the first time that the candidate, who had paid him a private visit after his investiture, organized a common public outing, heavy with meaning given the past tensions.
In June 2019, Ms. Pécresse left LR denouncing a party “padlocked from the inside, in its organization, but also in its ideas”. She had previously worried about a “shrinking” of the party then led by Laurent Wauquiez.
“It was a real detestation”, remembers a support of the candidate, “she found that he embodied a radical right, too divisive”.
Friday, Laurent Wauquiez hammered it: Valérie Pécresse “made a very important start to the campaign which consisted in turning the pages of the past”.
The former president of LR, who left these functions in 2019, retains a special status in the party even if he gave up running in 2022. “For activists, he is the star, when young people return to school he didn’t even have to open his mouth that it was a riot,” recalls a supporter of Ms. Pécresse.
Believing that “our country has entered into decline”, Mr. Wauquiez launched an “oath of Puy-en-Velay: that 2022 sounds the hour of the return of France”.
– “Educational Nation” –
There is now, according to him, “a deep convergence of views between all of us which was rebuilt on the occasion of the congress”, with “clear, firm convictions on the sovereign”, on “the revaluation of work” and “the control of public expenditure”.
Often seen as the bearer of a right-wing liberal vision, the founder of Libres! does indeed hear in his campaign a very firm tone on the sovereign, alongside Eric Ciotti.
Speaking of “restoring French pride”, promising to intensify the “charters” of undocumented immigrants or to “bring out the Karcher” against delinquents, she also displays her desire to revalorize work.
While the right finally has a chance to reach the second round, the candidate is working to gather as widely as possible, before a day on Saturday devoted to the Centrists and the UDI.
Beginning her visit on Friday with the health center, Ms. Pécresse had outlined her proposals there: “Less paperwork and bureaucracy”, “liberalize the combination of employment and pensions”, send “4,000 young doctors” to under-endowed areas at the end of their studies.
During a public meeting in Puy-en-Velay, she then dwelt at length on her project for education, at the risk of a discrepancy with the expectations of the room enthusiastic about the photo with Laurent Wauquiez.
“Public service for tutoring”, “national educational reserve” made up of retired teachers or students, “external schools of excellence” … It is necessary, according to her, “to return to the fundamentals” to create “an educational Nation”.
The one who wants, in the name of autonomy, “to put an end to school corporalism”, also promised, taking up an idea from Xavier Bertrand, that there would be “no more closing of classes against the advice of the mayor “. But if this requires “means”, there will be “no uniform revaluation for all”, she warned.