The German cleaning machine company Kärcher has once again called for his name not to be used in the French political debate. In fact, recently the candidate in the presidential elections Valerie Pécresse, from the center-right, has said on several occasions that “you have to get Kärcher out of the cellar” to “clean up the neighborhoods” of French cities, using an expression that has now entered the jargon of French politics, in which the brand is used, especially in right, as a metaphor for a securitarian and rigid approach towards crime, and often indirectly also towards immigration, with an implicit racist subtext.
These days the French branch of Kärcher issued a statement to demand that the French right stop bringing up his name, pointing out how Pécresse used it “inappropriately” in three interviews in the last week. But it has been going on for years, since in 2005 the then Minister of the Interior Nicolas Sarkozy mentioned the brand for the first time in a speech by introducing the expression into the French political lexicon.
Kärcher is the largest pressure washer company in the world, and in many countries, from Germany to the United States to France, his name has become a deonomic, that is, a common name derived from a proper name. In other words, the brand has become a synonym for the product, as happened for example in Italy with Scottex. While such a semantic process is usually a fortune for companies, Kärcher’s use of it for years by the French right is seen as a problem.
Pécresse, candidate in the presidential elections for the Republicans, the main French center-right party, had argued that “the time had come to bring out the Kärcher that in the last ten years had been put in the cellar by François Hollande and Emmanuel Macron” – the last two presidents of the French Republic – “to restore order to the streets” and “respond to the violence of the new barbarians”. Pécresse, which is one of the right-wing candidates more popular together with Marine Le Pen and Éric Zemmour, he also said that we must “hunt down the bosses, the thugs, the criminals, the drug dealers” and revoke their citizenship.
The German company specified that the Kärcher brand “is not the banner of any political party”, but an exclusive property of the companies of the group, and stressed that it wanted to distance itself from “all parties or political currents” that they used it for political purposes. The company also said it intends to defend “strong civic values” and to be engaged in activities of public interest, such as the cleaning of the Luxor obelisk on Place de la Concorde in Paris, organized in collaboration with the French Ministry of Culture.
In the statement, Kärcher also recalled that he has been fighting for years so that his name is not exploited in French political propaganda. The company name had entered the French political lexicon for the first time in June 2005, when Sarkozy quoted it when commenting on the death of an 11-year-old boy killed in front of his house in the northern suburbs of Paris. From then on it had spread to the rhetoric of the French right.
In 2016, before the last presidential elections, the company sent a letter to about twenty politicians asking them not to use its brand for political propaganda. In a 2020 press release, he again asked that his name and brand not be “borrowed” for any purpose other than advertising his products. Kärcher’s appeals, who in any case never sued any French politician, do not seem to have been successful.
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