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Valerie Pécresse
Photo: BENOIT TESSIER / REUTERS
It is interesting who is sitting in the front row of the Paris concert hall "Zénith" in the north of the city on this Sunday afternoon - and who is not.
The four men who lost to Valérie Pécresse in the Republican primary are there: including Brexit negotiator Michel Barnier and the controversial Éric Ciotti, who takes positions far right of center.
Like musketeers, the four have not left the candidate's side since December to demonstrate unity and unity.
The former and still popular justice minister Rachida Dati, now mayor of the 7th arrondissement in Paris, is also there.
This is remarkable in that just a few days ago she was harshly criticizing Valérie Pécresse's campaign and her campaign manager publicly called a "loser".
One demonstratively didn't show up - Nicolas Sarkozy, the last Conservative to be President and who still counts in the party, despite the fact that several court cases are pending against him that could end up in prison for him.
Although Sarkozy met with Pécresse on Friday afternoon, the candidate then announced that it had been a nice, more familiar encounter.
Sarkozy gets along surprisingly well with Macron
But he still doesn't support her and continues to leave open whether he ever will.
According to »Le Monde«, Sarkozy likes to tell visitors to his office that he finds »Valérie« rather »boring«.
Emmanuel Macron, on the other hand, he considers a man “with talent”.
The former president gets along surprisingly well with the incumbent president.
Macron is said to call him from time to time to get his advice.
Insiders therefore do not rule out the possibility that Sarkozy could also make an election recommendation outside of his own party.
At around 3.30 p.m., Pécresse entered the packed hall to the cheers of the »Young Republicans«.
8000 people came to the first big campaign event;
another thousand are sitting in an adjoining room.
Pécresse wears a state-wearing dark blue blazer, in videos party members have previously conjured up the qualities of the candidate: According to her, she is very loyal, very faithful and a woman who keeps her promises, is committed to the environment and has a big heart.
For now, however, she is above all a woman at a difficult moment in her campaign: she has had a terrible week this Sunday, perhaps the most terrible, since she was elected the Republicains' presidential candidate at the end of last year.
On Wednesday, former minister and Conservative Éric Woerth announced that he would not support her, but rather Macron.
He was followed on Thursday by the conservative mayor of Calais, who also switched to the Macron camp.
Former Secretary of State Nora Berra said on Friday that she too would support Macron because the Republicans had become too radical for her.
Pécresse knows: This event must be a liberation
A day earlier, a survey by the Ifop Institute on the electoral intentions of the French had become public, according to which Pécresse is level with the right winger Éric Zemmour for the first time: With 15 percent, both now have to share third and fourth place and are thus behind Emmanuel Macron (25 .5 percent) and Marine Le Pen (17 percent).
That's why Pécresse, like everyone else in this room, knows that this event must be a liberating blow, otherwise she has no chance of making it into the second ballot.
Only then can she become a threat to Emmanuel Macron, who has still not declared himself a candidate.
Today it is important to show her opponents and the French that she can still surprise them.
That she's not the boring "Madame Parfaite" she's always described as.
With her speech this Sunday, she wanted to "make the French want her," she had previously announced in interviews.
She will speak for over an hour, with a French and a European flag behind her and two teleprompters in front of her.
It will hardly deviate from the written text of the speech, Madame Parfaite seems to like to keep control of the word said.
more on the subject
Why Marine Le Pen is hoping to become French President: Her Final BattleBy Britta Sandberg, Paris
For more than an hour she describes the new France that she wants to lead and build as President.
It is a country in which the zigzag course of the incumbent president should no longer exist, but only straight lines.
In which no one denigrates French history as Macron did when he spoke of crimes against humanity by the French in Algeria.
In this new France, a President Pécresse would put a referendum on immigration to the vote soon after taking office.
The right-wing populist Marine Le Pen announced exactly the same thing.
As President, she wants to regain control over the rampant immigration, she wants to put a stop to the "Woke" movement, which only aims to destroy French identity.
She will fight for the principle of secularism, no religion should rise above French law.
Pécresse says that as president of the greater Île-de-France region, she banned burkinis in public swimming pools.
For her, the veil is not a normal piece of clothing, but a symbol of woman's submission.
"Marianne (editor's note: the French national figure) is not a veiled woman either," she calls into the hall.
The identity of the French, the national pride to be defended, the ideal of a France for which family and being together are so important, are central to the candidate's speech.
Later she will also talk about the abolition of inheritance tax, about massive tax breaks that she is planning and about her difficult path as a woman in the world of politics.
As a child, she never dreamed of becoming President of the Republic.
She knows these secret humiliations that one experiences as a woman;
the sexual harassment of superiors;
the guys who would get too close on the subway.
She was threatened with dismissal because she was pregnant.
But she never gave up.
Then she quotes Simone Veil, from whom she learned a lot.
Somewhere between right-wing identity politics and feminism, her campaign will take place in the coming weeks.
With her narrative as an independent, combative woman, she can clearly distance herself from Emmanuel Macron and Éric Zemmour.
When it comes to right-wing identity issues, it becomes more difficult because the competition is greater.
The line that remains between the right-wing populists Éric Zemmour and Marine Le Pen on the one hand and President Emmanuel Macron on the other is thin.
Probably too narrow for a liberation.
