Valérie Pécresse recalls a proverb that was used by one of the losing politicians in the primary battle five years ago.
In the latest primary among members of the Les Républicains party, Pécresse defeated favorites such as Barnier to win the nomination as candidate for next year's presidential election.
The leader of the Ile-de-France region that includes Paris, a career politician, stands a good chance of becoming France's first woman president.
Pécresse said that the party of General de Gaulle, of Georges Pompidou, of Jacques Chirac and Nicolas Sarkozy will have a female candidate for the presidential election. She says she gets things done and describes herself as two-thirds of the way done. She told the Financial Times that her opponents call her the Iron Lady.
A friend of hers says she will be a serious challenger. She has been a formidable minister.
She served as minister for higher education and the budget and was praised by her boss, but he wished she could have been more fun. According to the latest opinion polls, Pécresse was a good choice for the centre-right.
She would defeat far-right candidates such as Marine Le Pen and Eric Zemmour and get 20% of the first-round votes to advance to the second round. She would defeat the president in the second round by 52 per cent to 48, according to the poll. Elabe said that it was the first time that a published poll had Emmanuel Macron losing.
She is often underestimated according to a politics professor at the University of Nice. She has a lot of ministerial experience and she has been leading the most important region of France.
She won't have an easy campaign. Pécresse is depicted by her political enemies as a Roman Catholice who lives in the prosperous western suburbs of Paris, where voters supposedly appreciate provincial roots, although she has taken pains to emphasize her Corsican and southern origins.
Pécresse is a graduate of two of France's top institutions, the Ecole des hautes études commerciales, and the Ecole Nationale d'Administration, and he has also learned Russian and Japanese. She is the epitome of the French elite.
She is at risk of being dragged into uncomfortable political territory by her party, which moved so sharply to the right that she temporarily abandoned it in 2019, and by the pugnacious mood among white voters, who have been angered by Le Pen's anti-Muslim rhetoric.
Her proposal to double sentences for serious crimes committed in difficult suburbs where the police are often in danger was met with puzzlement by some critics. They said that she should have known that it was unconstitutional to discriminate in this way because she had taught constitutional law and been a member of the Council of State.
Pécresse's hardline stance on law and order and her commitment to economic reform and fiscal orthodoxy will play well with the French right.
She accused him of raiding the till to splash out taxpayers' money during the swine flu and promised to cut 200,000 administrative jobs from the civil service.
To please is the only obsession ofEmmanuelMacron. She told her supporters that she has only one obsession, and that is to actfaire, and that she sees the incumbent president's lack of commitment to the hard reforms that France needs.
Marine Le Pen, leader of the far-right Rassemblement National, would have been easily defeated by the leader of the left in the final round of the previous presidential election, if he had not been defeated by the leader of the left in a televised debate.
Pécresse is one of the main rivals for the seat of the presidency in 2022. She knows her history and economics and has a good record in government. Pécresse's friend of three decades says that he doesn't think that the president is comfortable.
victor.mallet@ft.com
