After strong debate performance, Fillon surged ahead of Juppe and Sarkozy in recent days, outperforming all polls to become the man te beat in the final primary with Juppe. Former president Sarkozy concedes defeat and retires from public service.
Fillon has a strong economic agenda and wants to restore relations with Russia.
Socialist leader and president Hollande is at an all time low in popularity ranking as worst French president ever.
As it happened: Fillon tops French conservative primary | France24 |
Former French prime ministers François Fillon and Alain Juppé will vie for the conservative nomination in a primary run-off after handing former president Nicolas Sarkozy a shock defeat on Sunday. Follow the events as they happened with our liveblog.
- Fillon stunned his opponents by taking more that 44% of the vote, well ahead of Juppé (28%) and Sarkozy (20%).
- The former president has conceded defeat and endorsed Fillon for the nomination.
- In his concession speech, Sarkozy said: “I have no bitterness, I have no sadness, and I wish the best for my country.”
- Organisers reported strong turnout of around four million voters.
- The suprising result puts Fillon, a pro-business conservative, in a commanding position ahead of next week’s second round.
- With the ruling Socialists all but written off, opinion polls suggest whoever wins the nomination will likely face – and defeat – far-right leader Marine Le Pen in the presidential run-off.
François Fillon: Very pro-free market, wants to cut 500,000 civil service jobs and reduce immigration to the “strict minimum”, said that Donald Trump’s election as US president should lead Europe to review its relations with Russia.
West ‘provoked’ Russia, says former French PM François Fillon | Politico EU – July, 2016 |
François Fillon, a former French prime minister who is now running for president, said the West was largely to blame for inflaming tensions with Russia. He called for closer cooperation with the Russian president on security, notably in fighting ISIL.
“I think [the West] made huge errors” in dealing with Russia after the Soviet Union’s collapse,” Fillon told journalists at the European-American press club in Paris. “We committed errors that led to the tensions that we know today … We partly provoked the situation.”
Having behaved in an “irresponsible” manner toward Moscow, the West now had to “find a way to speak to Russia,” Fillon said. “We have a challenge in keeping Russia focused on Europe and not sliding toward Asia.”
The best way to restore relations was to bring Russia into the Western-led coalition against ISIL and collaborate to crush the terrorist group, he added.
‘Acute Russophilia’
Fillon, who polls show to be ranked third in the race to win the Right’s nomination for president behind ex-president Nicolas Sarkozy and frontrunner Alain Juppé, is one of several members of the Républicains party urging the West to lift economic sanctions against Moscow and to pursue closer ties.
Sarkozy defeated in primary for French right’s presidential candidate | The Guardian |
François Fillon, a 62-year-old Paris MP, is the the epitome of the traditional provincial right. He is a Catholic from a village in north-west France, where he lived in a 12th-century chateau with his Welsh wife and their five children during a long career in local politics.
A tea-drinking anglophile, he has broken ranks with the long-running statist tradition of the French right to propose the most radical pro-business reform programme – vowing to cut a staggering 500,000 public sector jobs over five years. Attacked for going too far with proposed state cuts by Juppé, Fillon said in his final rally: “I’m tagged with an [economically] liberal label in the same way one would paint crosses on the doors of lepers in the middle ages. But I’m just a pragmatist.”
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More below the fold …
[Update-1] :: It’s François Fillon In A Landslide Win
It’s François Fillon In A Landslide Win
Fillon claims landslide win in French conservative presidential primary …
Former prime minister François Fillon on Sunday pledged deep economic reforms after winning the conservative Les Republicains’ presidential nomination.
Fillon, 62, resoundingly beat in-party rival Alain Juppé in France’s conservative presidential primary run-off, one week after he shocked the country’s political landscape by topping the first-round poll.
He earned 66.5 percent of votes in Sunday’s election, with Juppé trailing far behind with 33.5 percent support, results showed.
“Voters have understood my strategy: France can’t bear its decline. It wants truth and it wants action,” Fillon told supporters gathered to follow the primary results in central Paris. “I will accept this challenge for France: to tell the truth and completely change its software.”
François Fillon wins French primary to be candidate for the right | The Guardian |
In his victory speech, Fillon said the Socialist François Hollande’s presidency had been “pathetic” and France now had to be overhauled in a way that it “hasn’t been for 30 years”. He said France had a huge need for respect, pride and, overall, authority.
On the campaign trail Fillon, who will stand for the Republican party, argued: “France is more rightwing than it has ever been,” and that he was the only one able to tap into that mood and win France’s “ideological battle”.
He warned that France was “on the verge of revolt” and said his plan to slash half a million public sector jobs, reduce the welfare state, cut taxes for the rich and loosen business regulations was the only possible response for a demoralised country struggling with mass unemployment, a sluggish economy and a major terrorist threat.
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Fillon, who is on first-name terms with Vladimir Putin after they served as prime ministers in the same period, has advocated a stridently pro-Putin policy towards Russia. He said Russia was no threat, should be a partner in Syria and that European sanctions against Russia should be lifted.
Analysis: François Fillon’s victory creates strategy problem for Marine Le Pen | The Guardian |
The Front National has reason to fear Fillon. His traditionalist and socially conservative line on family values and “the Christian roots of France”, his emphasis on French national identity, “sovereignty” and “patriotism”, his hard line on immigration and Islam as well as a pro-Putin foreign agenda against “American imperialism” all overlap with some of Le Pen’s key ideas.
This could potentially see Fillon steal some of Le Pen’s most socially conservative voters, particularly rightwing elderly people, who always have a big turnout to vote but remain sceptical about the Front National.
“Fillon presents us with a strategy problem, he’s the most dangerous [candidate] for the Front National,” Marion Maréchal Le Pen, the Catholic and socially conservative Front National MP and niece of Marine Le Pen, told journalists this week.
