This is bad news 46 days before the presidential election. The LR primary which nominated Valérie Pécresse as presidential candidate would have been marred by “fraudulent maneuvers” aimed at inflating the electorate, says Wednesday the daily Liberation. In the files, Liberation spotted a dog, answering to the name of Douglas, registered in the Paca region by its pro-Ciotti owner, and “at least three people supposed to have joined the party after their death”.
The daily, which had access to the grail, the file of LR members, reveals in this very long investigation practices which, without calling into question the victory of the candidate, “question the security and the sincerity of the ballot” all the same qualified of “bogus”. “Among the members who joined LR in 2021, some do not exist or no longer exist”, affirms Liberation, who recalls that LR saw its workforce jump from around 80,000 at the end of September 2021 to 148,862 the following November 17.
Others “are hard pressed to explain why and how they joined the party” and some “have little interest in the ideas of LR and its candidate”, having “followed the instructions” or “done a service to a acquaintance, which has sometimes settled their membership”, affirms Liberation. These practices, which “are not all illegal”, represent “at least several hundred voters”, according to the daily, which could not consult the attendance list, destroyed after the vote. All the candidates for the primary carried out a race “for cards” of members to try to influence the vote also reveals the daily survey.
Community lobbying, “loaned phones” and “paid memberships”
The daily also affirms that in Île-de-France, the region of Valérie Pécresse, “a certain number of members do not have French nationality, and therefore do not have the right to vote”, and that “sometimes they do not speak not French, or barely”. These would include members of the Asian community, recruited face-to-face or on the social network WeChat, in particular by leaders of community associations, according to the article. Liberation also highlights the “very effective lobbying work” carried out with the Chinese community by several elected officials from Seine-Saint-Denis, “in conjunction with the vice-president of the region Patrick Karam”, a close ally of Ms. Pécresse. Finally, the daily speaks of “telephones loaned” and “memberships settled” in Mayotte by the former secretary of the LR section of Chirongui, Nadhira Saindou.
This LR primary had been tight, Éric Ciotti ahead of Valérie Pécresse by 665 votes in the first round. Behind, Michel Barnier was 1,209 votes, and Xavier Bertrand 2,966 from the president of Île-de-France. Asked by AFP, Valérie Pécresse’s entourage stressed that the LR primary had been “exemplary in its organization, its mobilization, and its union”.
“Faced with this attempt at destabilization, the president of the Republicans asked his lawyer to seize the public prosecutor of Paris against the newspaper Liberation and the authors of this article”, indicated the party of Valérie Pécresse in a press release.