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For once, the polls did not prove the prediction wrong: François Fillon, with 44% in the first round, was voted by nearly 2/3 of the voters. “An indisputable and undisputed victory,” declared Alain Juppé, a respectable loser. The race is over, and the heritage and parochial right has defeated the ecumenical one that wanted to unite a fractured France.
However, the right-wing people do not want half-measures; they want testosterone. Thus, Juppé’s softness does not pass. For this right, Fillon is the acceptable Le Pen, the social purge without being populist.
The French who supported Fillon did so for his clearly assumed right-wing positions on Islam, National Education, the civil service, health, or security…
His program is also very clearly oriented towards less state and more freedom to undertake. There will be no surprises; we know for whom we voted.
Returning to 39-hour workweeks, retirement at 65, a 2-point increase in VAT, a reduction in direct taxes, the abolition of the ISF, a reduction in public spending by 100 billion euros and 500,000 public jobs, capping and degresivity of unemployment benefits, and reform of independent work are the flagship points of his project.
“My approach has been understood,” said the winner of this primary. The color has been announced.
The voters of the right-wing primary are estimated between 4.2 and 4.6 million. The French registered on the electoral lists are 44.8 million.
In the Alpes-Maritimes, the convergence of Sarkozy supporters towards François Fillon enhanced an already clear result in the first round: partial figures credit him with 3/4 of the votes compared to 2/3 nationally.
The modest victory, Jean-Pierre Lelleux, who was the only elected official to campaign for François Fillon, declared: “It’s a choice I made at the time without any calculation or particular electoral strategy. A choice of heart and conviction.”
More institutional, Christian Estrosi (who has not yet metabolized the slap to Nicolas Sarkozy in the first round) did not ramble: “I congratulate @FrancoisFillon and call on the French who mobilized to redouble their efforts to make him the next President.” The so-called well-informed tell us that his relations with the primary winner are not the best. Moreover, the former “collaborator” in place of his mentor is hard to swallow.
Conversely, Eric Ciotti is clearly in recovery towards the one he was very close to during the campaign for the UMP presidency in 2013 and whom he subsequently abandoned to become Nicolas Sarkozy’s “Mr. Security”, with the prospect of becoming “his” Minister of the Interior: “The victory of @FrancoisFillon is strong and unambiguous, it has given power to the alternation,” he stated during an interview on Europe1 last night.
Obviously immersed in emotion, he even declared: “What @FrancoisFillon has accomplished in recent weeks is an unprecedented movement in contemporary political history.”
If we start with adulation at the end of November, what will follow in the coming months?
