Reuters Adam Payne

Francois Fillon will stand for the French conservatives in the
upcoming presidential election after claiming victory over Alan
Juppe in the Republican party primary on Sunday.

Partial results based on four-fifths of the primaries’ polling
stations showed Fillon winning by a huge margin of nearly 40%.

Fillon is set to go head-to-head with Marine Le Pen of far-right
party Front National in May’s election, meaning that the French
left-wing is set to be excluded from the contest altogether
after five years of socialist Francois Hollande in power.

Fillon, a socially conservative free-market advocate who has been
dubbed as France’s answer to former UK Prime Minister Margaret
Thatcher, had won over 67 percent of the vote in a
one-on-one battle with Juppe, who trailed on around
32%.

The former prime minister pledged to unite the Republican party
in a victory speech that he delivered on Sunday
evening. “I must now convince the whole country our
project is the only one that can lift us up,” a visibly moved
Fillon said at his campaign headquarters after Juppe conceded
defeat.

“My approach has been understood: France can’t bear its decline.
It wants truth and it wants action. I will take up an unusual
challenge for France: tell the truth and completely change its
software,” he added.

A spokesperson for the Front National said that the party
welcomed Fillon’s victory as it represented a “great” opportunity
for Marine Le Pen to take control of the party’s highest office.
Fillon has vowed to implement a range of tough economic policies,
such as slashing public spending, raising the
retirement age, scrapping the 35-hour working week, and cutting
back social security.

“His project is so sharply different from ours, and it is
such a harsh one, he cannot get a majority of voters to back
him,” the National Front’s Florian Philippot told Reuters. “For
us, he’s a great candidate (to face in the election).”

Speaking in an interview last week, Philippot described Fillon’s
manifesto as a “programme of chaos.” He said: “It’s impossible
that this austerity cure does not trigger chaos.”

Opinion polls have for months forecast that the center-right
candidate and Le Pen would qualify for the second round of the
presidential election in May and that Le Pen would then lose.

But polls, which had until just days before his victory, failed
to forecast Fillon’s comeback, are taken with an increasingly big
pinch of salt, especially after shocking results elsewhere in the
west like Brexit and Donald Trump’s victory in the US Presidental
Election.

All eyes now turn to the ruling Socialist party and to whether
the deeply unpopular President Francois Hollande will decide to
run for the left-wing ticket in his party’s primaries in January,
amid signs that his prime minister, Manuel Valls, is considering
a bid of his own.

France, the eurozone’s second largest economy, has faced
stubbornly high unemployment under Hollande, and the past two
years of his term have been marked by Islamist militant attacks
that have killed 230 people and focused attention on immigration
and security concerns too.