France now has a chance to bury the demons of its darkest political era

Valérie Pécresse, the candidate now chosen by the main centre-right French party, Les Républicains, could easily have fitted into Emmanuel Macron’s cabinet. She is a centrist, liberal, multi-lingual, pro-business technocrat with the same elite education as Macron.

An English comparison might be Amber Rudd or, in a previous Tory government, Virginia Bottomley. Pécresse is a friendly, articulate, middle-of-the-road mother of three, with loads of charm and a nice smile, but without that killer focus to go fast to the top.

She saw off three male opponents for the nomination. Michel Barnier, Monsieur Brexit, tried with a very late bid as the older Joe Biden-type candidate. But he had to pretend to be an anti-European and issued windy threats against Brussels which dismayed his fans and failed to convince party activists.

In the final run-off Pécresse was chosen over her hard-right rival Eric Ciotti. Pécresse was supported by every grandee of the Chirac-Sarkozy era of French  conservatives. They loathe Ciotti, who says the same things about Muslims, immigration, and crime as Marine Le Pen and Eric Zemmour and has no compunction about appealing to the very dark side of hard-right French voters.

That is now Pécresse’s dilemma. To overtake Le Pen and Zemmour she has to embrace the ultra-nationalist racist French politics which has resurfaced in the long run-in to next April’s election, fought over two rounds.

Le Pen and Zemmour between them score 35 per cent in most polls, compared to just 10 per cent for Pécresse, though this figure will rise sharply as she is now a single candidate for Les Républicains. But she is far from being the unity candidate. Forty per cent of the party’s 135,000 activists voted for Ciotti. Already, Ciotti has warned Pécresse she has to move to the right in order to win his support – and by extension the support of all his supporters. Le Figaro, France’s Daily Telegraph, carries a front-page editorial today warning Pécresse not to soften the right’s message in the hope of winning more support.

There is undoubtedly a solid body of support for right, anti-Muslim, anti-European, and above all illiberal authoritarian politics in France – at least a third or more of the electorate. From 1945 to 1980, the giant French Communist Party which supported Stalin’s Gulags, torture and mass murder of opponents, opposed immigration and European construction, also got about the same number of votes.

Shortly after Pécresse was declared the candidate of the French conservatives, her rightist rival Zemmour launched his new party at a mass rally in a suburb north of Paris. His new party is called “Reconquête”. What he wants to reconquer is a France, which, as he has argued over the years in books, TV shows and Le Figaro, is faced with the “Great Replacement” of its white people, national identity, and glorious history by “Islamist-leftists”, “wokeists” and cultural relativists who have cancelled French identity.

The first stage in this “reconquest”, with its harking back to the “reconquista” of Moorish Spain by Catholic kings who expelled every Muslim and Jew from Spain five centuries ago, was to attack journalists. Zemmour told his delirious fans: “My adversaries want my political death, journalists want my social death and jihadists want my death.”

His supporters booed and jeered French TV and other journalists at the rally. Anti-racist protestors were taken out by Zemmour security thugs and beaten up in the manner of an Oswald Mosley British Union of Fascists rally in London in the 1930s.

Can Pécresse really overtake Le Pen and Zemmour on the right? If she moves in their direction she will drive many moderate conservatives, liberal-centrists and even centre-left voters to Macron. If she stays on her ground of moderate, good government, liberal conservatism, which she has stood for all her life, she risks losing the necessary support of the Le Pen-Zemmour extremists.

The once dominant Socialist Party, which has provided three presidential terms and nine prime ministers of France since 1981, has been reduced to around 5 per cent support for its candidate Anne Hidalgo, the mayor of Paris. The Socialist Party Corbynised itself under France’s last socialist president, François Hollande, elected in 2012. His left-wing party opponents did their all to undermine him, and then openly put up different left candidates, thus providing the opening brilliantly spotted and exploited by the arriviste Emmanuel Macron.

By birth, education, wealth and marriage Valérie Pécresse has always been the centre-right noblesse oblige political leader. She is president of France’s richest region, the Ile-de-France, the Home Counties-style comfortable middle class suburbs around Paris.

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Her unimpressive record as a mid-rank minister under Nicolas Sarkozy (2007-12), helped to turn France to the left with the election of Hollande in 2012. As president of France’s richest region around Paris she has made no mistakes, but neither was there much innovation in her political leadership.

Les Républicains have a bottomless purse to fund a state of the art campaign and a big network of elected officials and supporters who want to see a new restoration of the traditional right in place of the parvenu usurper Emmanuel Macron.

The French campaign has erupted into life. But it is a fight of different rights against different rights. Macron will find words to hang on to his centre-right and liberal support from 2017 and bring the disappointed left and greens into his fold. Pécresse has to first bury the resurfaced demons of the darkest era in French politics. That will be hard. Then she will find Macron is a formidable man to beat.

Denis MacShane is the UK’s former minister of Europe. He wrote the first biography in English of François Mitterrand and appears frequently on French media