Less than three months before the presidential election, the LR candidate successively received the nomination of the Centrists then of the UDI, two small center-right formations which each met their national council on Saturday.

"My project is on the right, it is breaking, but it is 100% compatible with your values", launched the candidate in front of the Centrists.

"The family of the right and the center is ready to go and build the alternation" and "we are here to embody a third way between immobility and demagoguery", she added to the UDI.

Her first visit as a candidate, in December, was for Éric Ciotti.

Friday again, she was at Laurent Wauquiez.

"She secured" the right wing, said political scientist Philippe Moreau Chevrolet.

Then addressing the center is part of "a strategy of small stones, which can work in the face of a government felt to be anxiety-provoking, disorganized", he adds.

But for that "it will have to succeed in giving a boost at the end of the campaign", according to him.

Does his martial tone on the regal risk dissuade the centrists?

"Those who seek to oppose us do not know us", assured the president of the UDI Jean-Christophe Lagarde, who had however warned her against a "trap" to lock herself in her only family on the right.

"I have no problem with the state having to restore order, because that's the best way to protect the weakest," he said on Saturday.

"Athena"

"When you are center-right, you are liberal, you are attached to individual freedoms, but you are also for a strong state on its sovereign missions", for his part affirmed Hervé Morin, who is already his campaign adviser on the 'economy.

Saturday Valérie Pécresse skilfully measured the proposals, defending a "project of freedom and authority", of "French pride found in a beautiful Europe", praising the centrist values ​​in which she "recognizes herself".

"Europe, solidarity, freedom, decentralization" but also "open to society, its developments" such as "equality between all regardless of color or origin, gender equality", she shelled.

She also promised to "restore order in the accounts" with a program of "powerful reforms" on pensions, unemployment insurance or decentralization.

LR presidential candidate Valérie Pécresse on January 22, 2022 in Paris Geoffroy VAN DER HASSELT AFP

Auditioned by the UDI, she pleaded for "agricultural sovereignty", nuclear power as "full energy of the zero carbon strategy 2015", a "European Marshall plan" for Africa...

"Valérie Pécresse officially presents herself as the candidate for the center", mocked on Twitter Guillaume Peltier, ex-number 2 of LR who passed to Reconquête, and for whom "the only candidate on the right is Éric Zemmour".

Can the strategy work?

For Mr. Moreau-Chevrolet, "if the polls raise Zemmour and channel the extreme right around him, Valérie Pécresse will be able to play a strong card by simply being there, structured and present".

But that may not be enough according to him: "The weakness of his campaign from the beginning is that it has no character or narrative".

In this conquest of the centrist electorate, the former Sarkozyist minister harshly tackled Emmanuel Macron's "cynicism" and "contempt", his "permanent self-satisfaction" and his "blindness".

As an echo, Hervé Morin mocked a president "who fractured the country", while Jean-Christophe Lagarde called him "zig-zag", "ambitious" and "who only likes boots".

"To Jupiter who destroys by lightning, we prefer Athena who builds by force and by love", concluded Mr. Lagarde.

© 2022 AFP