PortraitWhile her campaign seems to be stepping up, the 2022 Republican presidential candidate is trying to shape herself into a brighter personality than a corset and conformist bourgeois who has been sticking to her skin since she entered politics.
“Fillon’s HQ reeked of death. » The premises at the Porte de Versailles, 2,500 m2, had outgrown a candidate tied up by scandals and barricaded in his office. Five years later, Valérie Pécresse still has a terrified memory. For her campaign, the candidate Les Républicains (LR) fought against her team to impose her decor: the former headquarters of Endémol, the production house of Loft Storyof which she kept the old wooden bar, open spaces where she put her paw – a corner « snacking »jars of marshmallow bears and rebranded restrooms « thinking rooms » (“places of reflection”) –, which parliamentarians and LR mayors visit in batches. “A HQ that looks like me”she maintains in her white jacket with satin lapels, which recalls those 1980s during which the women of the RPR wore light colors so that they were noticed in the photos.
“So, have you solved the Pécresse mystery?” » She has just sat down, a little stiffly, at the end of the sofa in her office, and the question fades, a provocative strand. For a while, you’d think she’d put it on herself. For two months now, she has been conducting interviews and podcasts in an attempt to build a more brilliant personality than this cold, corseted image of bourgeois conformity that has stuck to her skin for twenty years. As if four books were not enough to make her known to the French, she is preparing a fifth at Bouquins, which must be entitled To manage. Still in search of this mixture of momentum and affect, of this little irrational something called charisma and which makes the French presidential election the meeting of a personality and the people.
“I have always climbed everything via the north face”advances the candidate, sure of herself. “I am the surprised woman”she also explained, at the beginning of February, to her “strategic committee” : the one that nobody expected at the primary, “except Gérard Larcher”, the President of the Senate. The same day, she recalls the nickname, however unfriendly, with which the Macronist deputy Aurore Bergé, formerly responsible for the young UMP in the Yvelines, gave her: “the Mole”, because“at one point, hop, she appears”.
“Even Sarkozy did not see me coming”she slips into a rare confidence. « Bravo »he finally let go of him the day after his victory at the LR congress, on December 4. “I wish you win”, he added privately. But when she visits him, rue de Miromesnil – this was again the case on Friday February 11 – or when they speak on the phone, the former president is content with some advice by evoking his own campaigns. Publicly, however, nothing. A real Chinese torture. As if the idea of a successor ravaged the ego of « Nicolas ». Or as if he doubted her.
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