Candidate for Les Républicains seeks rightwing votes on weekend Éric Zemmour launches new party
Emmanuel Macron came under fire from the French right at the weekend as Valérie Pécresse was chosen as the presidential candidate for Les Républicains, while the far-right TV pundit Éric Zemmour launched a new party and Marine Le Pen travelled to Poland for a show of force with the Polish prime minister and other European populist parties.
Pécresse said her “mission” was to stop Macron. She called him a “zigzagging” president who had “run France into the wall with debt and taxes, a society where there is no more respect or authority”. In her first interview, with the Journal du Dimanche, she said Macron had saddled future generations with a wealth of problems including “debt, commercial deficit, taxes, struggling public services [and] a chronic crisis of authority”. She added: “France is damaged and divided, everything has to be repaired.”
