The conservative right-wing challenger to Emmanuel Macron in the looming French presidential vote grappled Friday with a wave of defections, while hoping former president Nicolas Sarkozy would finally offer his full-throated support.
Valérie Pécresse, whose poll numbers have stagnated since winning the conservative Les Républicains party primary in December, suffered the high-profile desertions just days ahead of her inaugural campaign rally.
Her team is hoping the event in Paris on Sunday will inject fresh momentum into Pécresse's bid, revealing a more personal side to Sarkozy's former budget minister and current president of the Île-de-France region that takes in the greater Paris area.
On Friday, Pécresse finally met with Sarkozy for over an hour to discuss a campaign on which he has remained noticeably silent, at least in public.
"It was a conversation among friends, frank and warm," a smiling Pécresse told a scrum of journalists after the meeting, adding that she was "very happy with the meeting".
"It was very useful for me to have the advice of a former president," she said, while declining to say if she would indeed have his backing.
'Inward-looking?'
Several former aides of the popular former president, however, have already jumped ship, saying they would not support their party's candidate.
On Wednesday, Eric Woerth, a Les Républicains heavyweight and Pécresse's former colleague in Sarkozy's cabinet, surprised loyalists by announcing he would throw his weight behind the incumbent president Macron.
"I don't agree with the party's message" of a France that is "nostalgic and inward-looking", he told the Le Parisien daily – reportedly without even warning Pécresse ahead of time.
The Républicains Mayor of Calais Natacha Bouchart, also close to Sarkozy, followed suit Thursday by saying Macron had been "attentive" to her coastal city's struggle to cope with migrants trying to reach Britain by sea.
And on Friday, another former Sarkozy minister, Nora Berra, told BFM television she would not support Pécresse.
Sarkozy has remained a fixture of the French right despite a series of legal convictions since failing to win his re-election bid in 2012.
His support is considered crucial for ensuring the Les Républicains base rallies behind Pécresse, who accuses Macron of being too weak on crime and immigration and simply "tells everyone what they want to hear".
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But French daily Le Figaro reported Thursday that in private, Sarkozy has criticised Pécresse's campaign choices and said "Valérie is all over the place" and "non-existent".
Like Le Figaro, Le Parisien reported that Sarkozy's private critiques of his former cabinet minister's campaign so far extend to the location of her first major rally: at Paris's Zénith concert hall on her home turf.
"She is taking no risk in doing that in Île-de-France!" an unimpressed Sarkozy tisked privately, according to the daily. "Anyone can fill a hall with 6,000 people in those conditions. She should have gone to Marseille, or to Lille like Eric Zemmour," he reportedly opined, referring to the upstart far-right candidate.
The former president is not expected to attend Pécresse's rally on Sunday.
'Zemmour bounces back'
Macron remains comfortably ahead at 23 to 25 percent in opinion polls, and is widely expected to finish on top in the first round of voting on April 10.
Another headache for Pécresse is that former TV pundit Zemmour is holding up in the polls and remains in contention to make it to the second round of voting.
Zemmour's views on French history and immigration, expressed with the clarity of someone who spent years as a commentator on prime time television, often chime with the hard right in Pécresse's own party.
An Ipsos-Sopra Steria poll of 12,500 respondents published Friday put Pécresse at 15.5 percent, just ahead of far-right contender Marine Le Pen at 15 percent, while Macron stood at 24 percent.
Zemmour, whose campaign late last year appeared on the brink after a series of mishaps, climbed up 1.5 points in the polls to 14.5 percent.
Analysts say the presidential vote will almost certainly boil down to a contest on the right, with no left-wing candidate currently polling in double-digits.
(FRANCE 24 with AFP)
