Valerie Pecresse won by a large margin the ballot of the primary of Les Republicains with Eric Ciotti and is now the candidate for the French presidential elections of the conservative party heir to the Gaullist tradition. Valerie Roux – Pecresse married – was born on 14 July 1967 in Neuilly-sur-Seine in the hinterland of Paris and graduated in economics in 1988 from the prestigious Parisian school of Hec to then integrate the National School of Public Administration , Ena, coming out second of its course. Listening to the Council of State in 1992, at the beginning of her political career she aroused the interest of the socialist Lionel Jospin but preferred to join Jacques Chirac’s team, of which she became a councilor. Pecresse, married and mother of three, also taught constitutional law at Sciences Po Paris for 6 years, until 1998. In 2002 she joined the new party of the Union for a Popular Movement (UMP), founded by Chirac. In the 2002 legislative elections she was elected deputy in her constituency of Yvelines, a position she held until 2007 and in which she was reconfirmed in 2012.
In the first and second government Francois Fillon was Minister of Higher Education and Research, from 2007 to 2011, promoting the reform of the autonomy of universities. In 2010 he became president of the Ump group at the Ile de France regional council. In 2011-2012 he was Minister of the Budget, Public Accounts and State Reform and spokesman for the third Fillon government. Leading the way in the 2015 regional elections, with his victory at the presidency of the Ile de France he handed the region back to the right after 17 years of socialist power. In 2017 he left the party after Fillon’s defeat in the presidential elections to create his “Soyons Libres!” Movement. In June 2019, after the European elections, Pecresse left Les Republicains, denouncing its too far to the right and its ‘narrowing’. Since then, despite having her own political movement, she has remained tied to her political ‘family’.
Last June she was re-elected president of the Paris region for a second term. In favor of a single and unified candidacy of the right and the center, in the end he had to yield to the will of the LR militants and in order to participate in the primary in mid-October last Pecresse – which enjoys the support of a part of the Sarkozy current – has once again joined to the party. His campaign for the primaries was marked by many meetings on the ground and with the media, focusing with energy and determination on a very detailed program. Pecresse proposes a “strong and humanist” right, with the aim of “restoring French pride” and “restoring order in the country”.
He defends the ideas of equity, social justice, environmental protection and is in favor of massive public investments in the health sector to strengthen it both in the city and in the French countryside. Security, justice, education, immigration and family were the central themes of his campaign, together with the suppression of 200,000 jobs in the public administration and the achievement of carbon neutrality by 2050. His new challenge is to raise the prices of conservatives. French, crushed by the competition to the right of Marine Le Pen’s Rassemblement National and the radical polemicist Eric Zemmour, also in the field for the Elysée.