Presidential 2022: on the right, the battle for the primary is on

The great maneuvers have indeed started on the right.

After LR number 2 Guillaume Peltier called in our columns on Monday for his party to line up behind poll favorite Xavier Bertrand for the presidential election, four tenors from the right and the center (including three potential candidates) - the president of Île-de-France Valérie Pécresse, of Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes Laurent Wauquiez, of Normandy Hervé Morin and the president of the LR group in the Senate Bruno Retailleau - call for the organization of an open primary in a published forum this Monday evening on the Figaro site.

"That polls, the reliability of which is more than ever in doubt, serving as a means of selecting our candidate can satisfy no one," they write, targeting without naming the president of Hauts-de-France who refuses any participation in a primary. "The other risk would be to wait, betting that the problem will resolve itself, as if by magic", they continue, this time attacking the idea, long defended by Christian Jacob, according to which a "natural candidate" would end up by emerge by the fall (François Baroin in the heart of the president of LR).

“We must therefore rely on the clearest, most democratic system: the vote.

A popular vote, as broad as possible, open to all supporters of the right and the center, ”plead the four signatories of a text whose project had already been mentioned, but aborted, before the regional ones.

They call for "all those responsible for the right and the center" to agree on the "rules of the game" around a table in July, "as quickly as possible".

"We do not despair of finding a natural candidate"

Getting around a table is precisely what LR's political office must do on Tuesday. Pressured by this forum but also by Jean Leonetti, whom he asked to think about a way to decide between the presidential candidates, and who also said he was in favor of an open primary in the JDD, Christian Jacob should vote for a agenda which refers to a Congress on September 25 the choice by the militants of the modalities of a tie-breaking process that he proposes to modestly name "process of gathering" ...

The initial calendar would be unchanged but the rule now would be that the party organize a primary, and the exception that it finds a natural candidate. This was the reverse principle defended until then by Christian Jacob. “We do not despair of finding a natural candidate, but we are pragmatic. At this stage, there is none, ”recognizes the entourage of the President of the Republicans. Sign of change: the second opinion poll, initially planned for October to try to bring out a natural candidate, could finally be abandoned.

"The purpose of the platform in Le Figaro is to show that they are all capable of talking to each other, unlike Xavier Bertrand", decrypts an LR source. And try to pass it off as a divisor while the good results of the right in the regions have restored confidence to the electorate who would not accept that the machine of divisions, and therefore to lose, starts again for the umpteenth time. . On Bertrand's side, we point to the same need for unity to better extol the need to bypass a primary, itself a source of divisions. “It is always the second in the polls that appears as the divisor. They're all going to hit each other in the cars when Xavier gets in the locomotive! ", Hammered Monday evening a close to the president of Hauts-de-France.