The best way to describe Valérie Pécresse is Emmanuel Macron in a blouse. The newly-elected candidate for Les Republicans (LR) swears she is the French president’s polar opposite, but ideologically there is little to separate the pair.
The 54-year-old Pécresse, who will now stand against Macron in next year’s presidential election, has been on the political scene for three decades. She is currently the president of the Paris region, and is not only stinking rich, but a centrist, a globalist and a committed Europhile.
Pécresse was born in Neuilly-sur-Seine, the poshest part of Paris, into an upper middle class family. She shares an Alma mater with Macron, École Nationale d’Administration, the elite technocrat college that is a conveyor belt of European Groupthink.
Like Macron, too, Pécresse is embittered by Brexit and believes those who dared to vote Leave should be punished. In 2017, she threatened a ‘very painful economic future’ for Britain while reaching out to Remainers by saying it would be possible to rejoin.
If those declarations have a familiar ring to them, that’s because they’ve been parroted by every centre-right politician for the last three decades.
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