France: Presidential Candidate Wants to ‘Counteract’ the ‘War of Civilization that the Terrorists Want to Conduct’

Valérie Pécresse has just won the primary of the Republicains, the center-right party in France.

She defeated Eric Ciotti 61% to 39%. I had hoped he would win, because he has been hardline – sounding like Eric Zemmour — on the three interrelated concerns that now preoccupy French voters: immigration, Integration, Islam. Ciotti wants to ban the wearing of the hijab; he deplores the existence of No-Go areas where Muslims rule, and where the French state must reassert its authority; he has called for a referendum on immigration; he has suggested that a French “Guantanamo Bay” be created for the most dangerous Muslim prisoners.

But Pécresse has also been no slouch on the subject of Islam, as we shall see. More on her victory is here: “‘The right is back’: Gaullists pick female candidate Valérie Pécresse to take on Macron,” by Kim Willsher, Observer, December 4, 2021:

France’s rightwing opposition party has chosen a female candidate for next year’s presidential election for the first time in its history.

Valérie Pécresse emerged victorious after two rounds of voting by members of Les Républicains that unexpectedly saw favourites including “Monsieur Brexit” Michel Barnier knocked out in the first vote last week.

Pécresse now faces an uphill struggle to impose herself on the presidential campaign, with the election a little over four months away, on 10 April. Among her rivals will be Paris mayor Anne Hidalgo, the Socialist party candidate who is trailing in the polls and with whom Pécresse has regularly clashed over city hall decisions.

Supporters chanted “Valérie, Valérie” as the result of the poll of 150,000 party members was announced on Saturday afternoon showing she had beaten her hard-right rival Éric Ciotti by 61% to 39%. Neither had been a favourite to come through the first round.

It is worth noting that Pécresse and Ciotti were the two candidates – out of a total of five running in the primary of Les Republicains – who are most firm on the need to deal with immigration, and especially with France’s unintegrated and threatening Muslims.

Pécresse, 54, is currently president of the Île-de-France regional council, which includes Paris. She served as budget minister and higher education minister during Nicolas Sarkozy’s 2007-12 presidency.

“For the first time in its history, our party will have a female candidate for the presidential election,” she said. “Between the outgoing president and me, there’s a difference in our natures. Emmanuel Macron has one obsession, which is to please. Me, I have only one passion, which is to do.’

In the original French, it rhymes: “Emmanuel Macron n’a qu’une obsession, c’est de plaire et moi, c’est de faire.

She added: “Nothing is doomed. We are not condemned either to disorder or to decline. Our country is full of talent, full of energy.

This is a dig at Zemmour, who writes at great length about the decline of France, a decline that can only be reversed, he insists, if the French accept Zemmour’s prescriptions for national self-preservation.

“The Republican right is back … we will give our country back its unity, its dignity and its pride.”

During the party’s primary campaign, the main Les Républicains candidates veered from the party’s traditional centre-right territory towards the far right. Ciotti declared that he would hold a referendum to stop mass immigration and set up a “French Guantánamo Bay” to deal with terrorism.

Pécresse, who has described herself as “two-thirds Angela Merkel and one-third Margaret Thatcher,” had argued she was the candidate with the experience and prominence to take on Macron. As education minister, she faced down long-running street protests and university sit-ins to force through reforms to higher education. A former budget minister, she has, until now, been pro-European and moderate; she promises to focus on the economy and on building consensus if she makes it to the Élysée Palace, and has pledged to increase salaries and end the 35-hour maximum working week.

“However, in an election campaign that has so far turned endlessly around the three I’s – immigration, integration, Islam – Pécresse has also hardened her line, promising laws to increase “domestic security and combat Islamic extremism”.

It remains to be seen whether she will move any further to the right, but in her victory speech on Saturday Pécresse appealed to voters “tempted by Marine Le Pen or Éric Zemmour” – the two far-right contenders who have dominated the campaign so far….

She does not condemn either Le Pen or Zemmour, or their views on Islam. She wants their supporters, and she can win them to her side only If she convincingly accepts their — Le Pen’s and Zemmour’s — views on the menace of Islam.

Pécresse, who was born in the wealthy Paris suburb of Neuilly-sur-Seine, is a graduate of the now-dissolved École Nationale d’Administration (ENA), the grande école and hothouse for the country’s political elite, finishing an impressive second in her class. Even before then she had been a brilliant student, passing her baccalauréat at 16, two years early, and learning Russian at 15 while spending time at young communist camps in what was the Soviet Union.

“I followed propaganda courses and sang the Internationale in Russian,” she recalled afterwards. “From these trips, I was left with an attachment to freedom of thought, the idea that non-conformism is more rightwing than leftwing. And the language.”

France’s 2022 presidential election is a two-round vote, the first taking place on 10 April and the second two weeks later. The definitive list of candidates will not be known until March, when all candidates must submit a list of 500 signatures of support from the country’s mayors or specific elected officials. So far, around 20 people have officially announced their candidacy, including eight from the left.

Polls carried out before Pécresse was chosen as Les Républicains’ candidate suggest Macron is still expected to be re-elected next year, but the most likely scenario remains a second-round dual between the president and Le Pen, a repeat of 2017….

All of the anti-immigration anti-Islam candidates – Le Pen, Zemmour, and now Pécresse – will have to join forces when the Presidential election is held, and given Macron’s increasing unpopularity, whichever of the three runs against him has — despite the poll taken before Pécresse’s victory — a good chance of winning.

The left, meanwhile, is divided and struggling. According to BFM TV’s Élyséemètre, an amalgamation of the main opinion polls, Hidalgo is trailing behind the Ecology-Green party candidate Yannick Jadot and the hard left’s Jean-Luc Mélenchon.

None of the three left-wing candidates can win, fortunately for France. Unsurprisingly, they appear unperturbed by the consequences of mass immigration, and believe that if more resources are thrown at the problem, Muslims in France will eventually manage to integrate.

Pécresse is very well-off, from the haute bourgeoisie, and a husband who is the director of a GE subsidiary. She is in favor of the free market; she wants to allow people to work longer than the current official limit of 35 hours a week. She intends to raise government salaries and at the same time, reduce the size of the government bureaucracy by cutting 150,000 jobs. Her focus was originally to have been on the economy, but the candidacy of the redoubtable Eric Zemmour has forced the others running, including Valérie Pécresse, to focus more on Islam and immigration.

Pécresse even echoes Zemmour when she says: “I want to restore French pride. Because a proud nation is one that marches forward it’s not a nation that trembles at adversity, it’s a nation both unique and universal that speaks to the world.”

She has called for the closing of all mosques where “extremism” is preached, or where terrorists are discovered to have frequented. When three mosques in the Ile-de-France were closed, she commented ”I say it’s about time, and I say it’s for the best.” 

She suggests the introduction of maximum annual immigration ceilings and stricter conditions for the issuance of a residence permit, such as having “sufficient resources” (the amount of which would be raised by 25% from the amounts currently required), “mastery of the French language” and “respect for secularism and the values of the Republic.” Finally, she wants to exclude people who have been living in France for less than five years from social assistance.

She’s ready to put a cap on annual immigration, and to make other requirements for those seeking residence permits that are certain to cut down drastically on Muslim immigrants: “mastery of the French language” and “respect for secularism and he values of the Republic” will certainly prevent almost all Muslims from receiving those residence permits, without which they cannot remain in France. And the property requirement – would-be residents will have to possess “sufficient resources” to not become a burden on the state – is also likely to keep almost all Muslims, save for the rich Gulf Arabs, from qualifying for a residence permit. But the most important of her proposals is to exclude everyone who has lived in France for less than five years from receiving social assistance. This means that the maghrebins who are expecting, upon moving to France, to at once receive the generous benefits the French welfare state provides, especially free or subsidized housing, free medical care, and family allowances, will find they are ineligible. They will have to immediately go to work, which is not what they expected. Many will be so discouraged at the demands that Pécresse claims should now be made on them, that they may not even try to get into France. And one assumes that if Pécresse becomes president, she will remove social assistance from those immigrants who have already been living in France, but for less than the required five years.

It’s going to be a very different France for immigrants, especially Muslims, if Pécresse or Le Pen or Zemmour is elected. Even Macron, now under so much pressure from the articulate right, will have to harden his immigration policies If he hopes to win.

There is one thing about Pécresse that is worrisome. She still insists on claiming that one must distinguish between “lslam” and “Islamism.” She cannot yet bring herself to criticize Islam and limits her denunciation to the “terrorists” who push for “Islamism.”

She has described, for example, a “war of civilization that the terrorists want to conduct. Our society must provide itself with the means to counteract this threat.”

She will eventually realize that the difference between “Muslim terrorists” and the other Muslims is that those she calls “terrorists” are in fact observant, “good” Muslims, taking fully to heart the texts and teachings of Islam, and those who oppose them are the “bad” Muslims insufficient in their faith and in carrying out its commands. And then Valérie Pécresse will experience horror, and sorrow, too.