Laura Laplaud 2:23 p.m., February 14, 2022

For several weeks, the candidate Les Républicains in the presidential election, Valérie Pécresse, has stagnated in the polls.

And even worse, the president of the Île-de-France region is facing defections in her own camp, like the former Sarkozy minister, Éric Woerth, who announced his rallying to Emmanuel Macron.

Will the candidate succeed in overcoming this ordeal?

The presidential candidate, Valérie Pécresse, is struggling to get her campaign off the ground.

For her first major electoral meeting, the president of the Île-de-France region was at the Zenith in Paris on Sunday.

During a speech of more than an hour in front of 7,500 activists, the candidate tried to rally her troops.

But on the form, Valérie Pécresse has suffered criticism.

"There were times when we had the feeling that she was reciting a bit of a text, but at the same time, it also revealed aspects of Valérie Pécresse", judge Bruno Cautrès, researcher at the CNRS and the Center for Political Research of Sciences Po (CEVIPOF), guest of Europe Midi.

A martial stance

The candidate Les Républicains (LR) wanted to show that she is a strong woman.

"His attitude wanted to show the people who attended the meeting that we were dealing with someone who had a sense of command, someone who wanted to embody the extremely vertical posture with his fist very often clenched", analyzes the researcher.

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"It is necessary, in a meeting, that emerges a fervor of the militants which catapults their candidate, which propels him", underlines Bruno Cautrès.

A fervor which was therefore felt intermittently this Sunday.

If some activists chanted "Macron at Touquet, Valérie at the Élysée", as the researcher explains, the form was unconvincing.

"The activists were perhaps applauding a few seconds before, after, the moment when it should have been," he breathes.

Right wing turn

The bottom of his speech, resolutely on the right, intrigued.

"Faced with these vital questions, there is no fatality, neither the great downgrading, nor the great replacement", chanted the candidate at the Zénith de Paris.

A formula that was until then reserved for the hard right and used to talk about mass immigration.

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Why does the candidate use the term "great replacement", popularized by the writer Renaud Camus and regularly taken up by Eric Zemmour.

"She happens to be in a situation of very strong competition with Eric Zemmour in particular, and Marine Le Pen. So she has to fill up on this segment of the right which has a lot of expectations and a lot of requests for public safety, immigration," he explains.

"From this point of view, there was a form of very great consistency between the posture of Valérie Pécresse during the primary and the posture of her meeting on Sunday", relates Bruno Cautrès. 

In addition, Valérie Pécresse received the support of former Prime Minister Edouard Balladur, who went to the HQ of the candidate.