Bruno Retailleau or Laurent Wauquiez for the LR presidency? Members have started voting

LR activists have 24 hours to vote online. The results will be announced Sunday evening by the party's secretary general, Annie Genevard, who is also Minister of Agriculture, at the Republicans' Paris headquarters.

The outcome of the election is far from certain: by going from 43,859 to 121,617 members in the space of two months, LR has seen its electorate suddenly swell. It's unclear who will benefit from these recruitments, led at a cracking pace by both candidates.

Laurent Wauquiez arrived at the LR office in Le Puy-en-Velay on Saturday shortly before 6:30 p.m., wearing a suit and tie. Within minutes, he cast an electronic vote on a laptop placed on a table.

"Voted," he said, smiling, declaring himself "extremely confident (and) in great shape." "I ran a Chirac-style campaign: going everywhere, transmitting my energy, my passion, what I want to bring to our political family," he affirmed.

Facing the Minister of the Interior, who has been in the spotlight since his arrival at Beauvau, Laurent Wauquiez held nearly 120 public meetings across the country.

During these three months of campaigning, the leader of the LR deputies has fired from every angle with very right-wing proposals such as sending dangerous foreigners subject to an obligation to leave the territory (OQTF) to Saint-Pierre-et-Miquelon, "ending welfare" by limiting the RSA to two years or even the creation of "a sanitary cordon" around LFI.

He also held up the Italian ultra-conservative Giorgia Meloni as a "model for the right" and called for a rallying of the right, ranging from the Minister of Justice, the former LR Gérald Darmanin, to the Zemmourist MEP Sarah Knafo (excluding the RN and its allies).

Omnipresent on immigration, Bruno Retailleau, avoided responding to his rival's proposals, but multiplied measures as Minister of the Interior, tightening the criteria for naturalization of foreigners and calling for a showdown to force Algeria to take back its nationals subject to an obligation to leave the territory... without success.