“It will go very well, I guarantee it.” Edouard Philippe knows that Emmanuel Macron’s visit to Le Havre on Thursday will be closely scrutinized as these two allies struggle to hide their disagreement, which has worsened with the former’s candidacy to succeed the latter.
The head of state is visiting the Normandy port, where his former prime minister is mayor, to commemorate its liberation from Nazi rule in September 1944.
An unexpected step in its memorial cycle for this 80th anniversary. It is “the first time” that Le Havre has organized “major ceremonies”, “because of the trauma” caused by the Allied bombings, they say at the Elysée.
At the end of the day, in front of the imposing war memorial, the mayor and the president will each give a speech.
The invitation dates back to spring.
An eternity: it was before the dissolution of the National Assembly, this dissolution “poorly thought out, poorly explained, poorly prepared”, by which Emmanuel Macron “killed the presidential majority”, in the words of Edouard Philippe, of a rare harshness coming from a political “friend”.
This was before Macron’s defeat in the legislative elections, and the inextricable situation of an Assembly without a majority.
– President until the end –
And that was before the announcement of the Le Havre native’s candidacy “for the next presidential election” on September 3 in Le Point.
The president cannot run for a third term, and the ambitions of his former second were no mystery to anyone. However, he was “surprised” by the interview, according to a close friend.
Firstly because the two men had met the day before for two hours, and the subject had not been raised. Secondly because of its “offbeat” timing, while the head of state was looking for a Prime Minister.
Finally, by its wording. Asked about the hypothesis of an early presidential election — in other words, a resignation of Emmanuel Macron –, Edouard Philippe “confirms” that he is ready.
“Destabilizing the presidential function is dangerous. Especially when you want to be the heir to Gaullism,” protests a resigning minister, while Emmanuel Macron makes it known that the next presidential election “will be in 2027,” at the end of his term.
Since then, the former close associate of Alain Juppé has refuted any “attempt to destabilize the president.” “It is essential for the institutions that he completes his mandate,” he insisted.
Nevertheless, the two men have been eyeing each other up since Emmanuel Macron, during his first election in 2017, went to seek out Édouard Philippe to install him at Matignon, he who was then a Republican executive unknown to the general public.
Even though the head of government used to say, at the time, that there was not “a sheet of cigarette paper” between them, successive accounts converge on one observation: the current never really passed.
– “The opposite” –
And for good reason.
Where Emmanuel Macron professes the “at the same time”, Edouard Philippe has always continued to call himself “right-wing”. The president immediately frames him, by giving his own speech before Parliament just before his Prime Minister’s general policy statement.
The latter, instead of acting as a lightning rod, at times at Matignon, particularly during Covid, benefits from a popularity greater than that of the tenant of the Elysée, who ends up parting ways with him in July 2020.
The Gaullist will never join the presidential party but will found his own party, Horizons, in 2021.
“Loyal but free,” Edouard Philippe promises.
But the further the five-year term goes on, “the more the tonic accent” is “placed on the word free”, warns Christophe Béchu, secretary general of Horizons. However, he adds, the dissolution has precipitated “the stage in which this freedom manifested itself”.
The new candidate no longer hides his differences. “Generally, when I give him advice, he does the opposite,” he said in July.
The same goes for the reading of institutions. “The president must preside, the government must govern, Michel Barnier is perfectly right to emphasize this necessity,” he said on BFMTV on Wednesday, giving enthusiastic support, much more than the rest of the Macronists, to this other baron of the right that the head of state has just appointed to Matignon.
An exchange between them is possible in Le Havre, the scene of one of their last joint outings during the 2022 campaign.
An opportunity to purge the differences? In the meantime, Emmanuel Macron is in a paradoxical situation, forced to coexist with a Prime Minister from an opposing camp and at odds with his two main putative heirs, Edouard Philippe and Gabriel Attal.
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