A bang in the French sister party of the CDU / CSU: In the member vote at Les Républicains (LR) on Thursday, Eric Ciotti and Valérie Pécresse surprisingly qualified for the decisive duel for the presidential candidacy.

The MP Eric Ciotti, who drew attention to himself with a firm course to the right, did best with 25.5 percent of the vote.

The regional council president of the capital region, Valérie Pécresse, got 25 percent of the vote.

Michaela Wiegel

Political correspondent based in Paris.

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Former Brexit negotiator Michel Barnier, who was a favorite in the English-speaking press in particular, was third with 23.93 percent of the vote and was eliminated. Poll favorite Xavier Bertrand, who heads the Hauts-de-France region, also failed to qualify for the final selection with 22.26 percent of the votes. The doctor Philippe Juvin received the worst result with 3.13 percent. Almost 140,000 paying members were allowed to cast their votes. The turnout was a little more than 80 percent, as the LR chairman Christian Jacob announced.

The decisive election duel begins this Friday, the result is to be announced on Saturday. The voting takes place exclusively electronically. Former minister Pécresse now has a good chance of being the first woman to be nominated for the party's presidential candidate. The 54-year-old ENA graduate was “discovered” by Jacques Chirac and can look back on experience as a member of parliament and as research and budget minister. The mother of three children has been running the economically strongest region around the capital Paris since 2015. Your campaign manager, Patrick Stefanini, was already campaigning for President Chirac.

It embodies a moderate course and had made itself independent with the party "Libres" after the party chairman Laurent Wauquiez, who has since resigned, disseminated right-wing theses. She only returned to her party in the primary campaign and recommended herself to the members as a mixture of “Thatcher and Merkel”. The defeated Xavier Bertrand called on his supporters on Thursday to cast their vote in Pécresse, and the other two defeated candidates also joined in.

Ciotti, on the other hand, comes from the right wing of the party and has made a name for himself with pithy sayings. He wants France to step out of the European Court of Human Rights in order to have a free hand in immigration policy. In the primary campaign, he promised to use the army to fight crime and drug trafficking in socially disadvantaged areas. Ciotti has announced that it will vote for right-wing extremist Eric Zemmour rather than President Emmanuel Macron in the presidential elections.

The outcome of the first round of elections was eagerly awaited. The party, which has been badly hit since the corruption allegations against its former presidential candidate Francois Fillon, had recruited tens of thousands of new members in the past few weeks. The membership had increased from 59,000 in 2019 to 139,000. The political attitudes of the new members remained a mystery to the last. Ciotti stood out in the TV debates with his radical ideas, which hardly differed from the proposals of his "friend" Zemmour.

Pécresse, on the other hand, insisted on questioning the suggestions of her rivals, which once led Barnier to say: "Yes, Valérie, of course you know better!".

The former presidential party LR has been in opposition for ten years and, with 112 members, is the second largest parliamentary group in the National Assembly.

The second chamber of parliament, the Senate, on the other hand, is led by a right-wing majority.

Senate President Gérard Larcher comes from the Republicans.

LR also remains influential at the regional and local level.