She prevailed in the internal primary of the Conservative Party on Saturday against the MP Eric Ciotti. The liberal 54-year-old politician received around 61 percent of the vote in the runoff election, party leader Christian Jacob said. The strongly right-wing Ciotti only got 39 percent, it said.
Pécresse was the favorite in the runoff election. It was a surprise that she had made it to the second round of the primaries. For a long time, the former Labor Minister Xavier Bertrand was the favorite for the presidential candidacy republican been traded. However, Bertrand failed in the first round of the primaries.
Pécresse is a former university minister and incumbent regional president of Ile-de-France. In a poll for the presidential election at the end of November, she was eleven percent in fourth place behind incumbent Emmanuel Macron and the two right wing candidates Marine Le Pen and Eric Zemmour. For internal preselection of the republican the 140,000 party members had been called.
Pécresse may be able to target the center-right voters Macron relies on, but must seek the support of more conservative voters who are also being courted by right-wing candidates. During the election campaign she promised to halve the number of residence permits for non-EU migrants, to tighten the penalties in problem areas where the police are under pressure and to allow women who accompany their children on school trips to wear Muslim headscarves to forbid.
Source: Nachrichten
