Eric Ciotti or Bruno Retailleau will inherit, Sunday at the end of the Congress, with a party threatened by the divisions.
by Matthieu Goar
Choose a new face, without yet knowing if it will accompany the Renaissance or disintegration. This weekend, the 91,109 members of the Les Républicains (LR) party called to vote must elect their new president. As this second round approaches, the two candidates, the deputy of the Alpes-Maritimes Eric Ciotti (42.73 % of the votes in the first round) and the leader of the LR senators and senator from Vendée Bruno Retailleau (34.45 %), have multiplied public meetings, online meetings, elected officials, travel … Last moments to mobilize, and above all reassure. Because for the republican right, scattered and sounded by the 4.78 % of Valérie Pécresse in the presidential election, a new division would be deadly.
In Le Figaro , Wednesday, the third man of the first round, Aurélien Pradié (22.29 %), refused to give a voting instruction. But he warned: “The most important thing is to come: gather. The future president will be up to him if he succeeds this first step,” said the Lot deputy, while putting pressure on several subjects: a reform of fairer pensions, or ecology. “It will be the election of the tightest president in the history of the party since Nicolas Sarkozy, Laurent Wauquiez and Christian Jacob had been largely elected. There will be all the more imperative to gather without denying the differences”, continues Antoine Vermorel-Marques, deputy of the Loire and support of Mr. Retailleau.
In this in-between-tours, the finalists promised to reserve a place of choice for Mr. Pradié and his supporters, but also to the defeated on Sunday. Thursday evening, during a meeting in Paris, Mr. Ciotti responded to those who see him as a character too divisive: “all my life I gathered, in the National Assembly, in my department, by putting forward Clear and strong ideas. “” We are polytraumatized divisions, and I think this gathering is the condition of our rebirth, “said Mr. Retailleau, Tuesday evening during an online meeting .
Thursday at the end of the day, the atmosphere became a little more heavy. After an article of Liberation on” dubious “memberships in the department of his competitor, Bruno Retailleau sent a letter to the High Authority of LR, In which he considers that this element throws “again the suspicion on the reliability of our internal voting system” and asks to study “any new measure which would strengthen the security (…) of our election”. A letter for the moment that has remained unanswered.
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