This first major campaign meeting of Valérie Pécresse was expected.
And it is an understatement to say that he was scrutinized.
And criticized.
This Monday morning, on RTL, presidential candidate LR admitted that "the room was incandescent" and that she was "hard to take".
EDITO RTL - Valérie Pécresse: a meeting, and still doubts.. "It was like diving into a big bath where you didn't want to dive", @olivierbost in #RTLPresidentielle
"What do we want for France? Fine speakers or someone who will do?", @vpecresse pic.twitter.com/0OdJSHreIF
– RTL France (@RTLFrance) February 14, 2022
And to justify, on the style: “If you want speakers, there are plenty of them in the countryside.
I'm a doer, and it's true that I'm more comfortable in direct dialogue with the French.
(…) The subject today is what do we want for France?
Do we want beautiful speakers?
That, we've had for ten years and we'll still have it, or do we really want someone who's going to do it?
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Read alsoPresidential: at the Zénith de Paris, Pécresse presents its “new France” … while waiting for a new dynamic
Valérie Pécresse then slipped into a smile: "a candidate had trouble holding meetings at the start of his political career, his name was Emmanuel Macron".
"I don't even understand the controversy"
As for her use of the expression "great replacement", which she is strongly criticized for, she assured: "the sentence is
I do not resign myself to the great downgrading or the great replacement
, it means that I do not resign myself precisely to the theories of Éric Zemmour and to the theories of the extreme right, because I know that another path is possible”.
"That's what I said yesterday and everyone makes me say the opposite," she added, assuring: "It's a sentence I said ten times in the primary and all the commentators who take it up have memories of periwinkles”.
Asked about the reality of the phenomenon, she replied that "there is no fatality in the great replacement and the great downgrading" - the very expression she used on Sunday.
“There are areas of non-France today in France, but I am not resigned to this great replacement but it is something that I have been saying for months, so I do not even understand the controversy”, she added.
Socialist candidate Anne Hidalgo estimated on Sunday that Valérie Pécresse had crossed "one more Rubicon" by evoking this conspiracy theory relayed by the far-right candidate Éric Zemmour.
On Monday, Olivier Faure expressed his "astonishment to see a candidate who calls herself a Republican taking up the words and concepts of the far right" and denounces a "permanent drift of the right".