Valérie Pécresse has not only declared the Swabian housewife, alias Angela Merkel, to be a role model with her solid budget policy.

The right-wing presidential candidate is now advertising the flagship product of a Swabian company.

She wants to “get the Kärcher out of the cellar, where François Hollande and Emmanuel Macron made it disappear over the past ten years”.

In France, the high-pressure cleaner is a symbol of a courageous fight against crime in socially disadvantaged areas.

The company management in Winnenden has repeatedly protested against the use of the brand name without success.

In June 2005, then Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy promised during a visit to the high-rise complex 4000 in La Courneuve that he would “clean up” this and other districts with the Kärcher.

Michaela Wiegel

Political correspondent based in Paris.

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Pécresse has unearthed the pithy saying of the last president of her party.

In Salon-de-Provence in the south of the country, she visited a former drug trading center, which was "cleaned up" thanks to the efforts of Mayor Nicolas Isnard.

The city invested millions in 151 video cameras to monitor all of the dealers' suspicious places around the clock.

Pécresse praised the security strategy and announced that, as President, she wanted to restore law and order and open ghettos “within a decade”.

She proposes a ten-year plan for the banlieue, the main aim of which should be the fight against unemployment.

In addition, she wants to change the allocation criteria in social housing and achieve a social mix through an active settlement policy.

She also seeks a reversal in law enforcement.

Due to the overcrowded prisons, sentences up to one year are no longer enforced in France.

This creates a feeling of impunity that ultimately undermines state authority, she laments.

"Monsieur Autorité" and the fratricidal struggle among the conservatives

The right-wing candidate is attacking President Emmanuel Macron on a terrain where he has little success. Although he is not yet an official candidate, the president reacted immediately. This Monday he will travel to the Côte d'Azur, the adopted home of Pécresse 'man for “authority” on the campaign team, Eric Ciotti. With a radical law-and-order course, the MP had won almost 40 percent of the votes in the membership vote on the presidential candidacy at Les Républicains (LR). Pécresse has entrusted him with the title of “Monsieur Autorité” on their campaign team for security issues.

With his planned visit to Nice, Macron is re-igniting a fratricidal conflict among the conservatives that MP Ciotti and the Mayor of Nice, Christian Estrosi, have been fighting for years. President Sarkozy had still managed to discipline the two fighters. But Estrosi, a former motorcycle racer, has since renounced his party. In 2015 he appeared as the savior of the Mediterranean region Provence-Alpes-Côte d'Azur, who saved it from the chairmanship of Le Pen's granddaughter Marion Maréchal. After two years, tired of this task, he resigned and was re-elected to the Nice City Hall. From there he gives Macron the right protection, also to wipe out his intimate enemy Ciotti.

In Nice, Macron wants to celebrate a security strategy that has been a trademark of the conservatives for years: nationwide video surveillance.

In addition, it is to lay the foundation stone for a new, 50,000 square meter security center.

National and local police officers are to work together in the building.

Marine Le Pen and Eric Zemmour are already scoffing at the show between Pécresse and Macron.

“The last time the Kärcher was taken out, 12 # .500 police stations were cut,” said Le Pen. Zemmour said that the last time Sarkozy promised a Kärcher, he conjured up “Kouchner”.

Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner, co-founder of the aid organization Doctors Without Borders, came from the sixty-eight movement and stood for the saying “Prohibition must be prohibited”.