Nailed to the ground. This Tuesday, May 28, when Gabriel Attal receives The world on the first floor of the Hôtel de Matignon, the Prime Minister has been constrained by the traditional reserve period since the day before. No announcement, no official trip until the European elections on June 9. The Prime Minister is impatient at the idea of going to commemorate the 80th anniversary of the D-Day landings. On June 6, the majority leader should meet at Omaha Beach, in Normandy, with his ” friend ” Justin Trudeau, the Canadian Prime Minister, whom he visited in April, is jubilant at the idea of greeting Prince William, heir to the English throne. Emmanuel Macron will be alongside Charles III. To him the prince, to the head of state the king. Quite a symbol.
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The thirty-year-old still seems intoxicated by his televised performance during the debate which pitted him, five days earlier, against the leader of the National Rally (RN), Jordan Bardella. “You bent it,” congratulated Valérie Hayer, head of the presidential camp’s list for the European elections, once the broadcast was over. On numerous occasions that evening, the head of government thought he had highlighted his opponent’s approximations. “On the single market, it floundered a little”, he judges. His interlocutor had a litany of files in front of him, when Gabriel Attal came empty-handed. “We may need cards, we are not computers”, excuses the Sciences Po graduate, as if to better underline his intellectual superiority.
François-Xavier Bellamy, head of the Republican list, like Raphaël Glucksmann, candidate of the left, were offended by this duel which once again features the RN, eclipsing the moderate adversaries of the macronie. Gabriel Attal recalls that he has long refused to debate with the far-right leader. “I questioned myself several times, because I don’t want to give him too much credit. But I decided to go there because it is necessary to show how the RN is fundamentally fragile and dangerous, and full of inconsistencies. explains the Prime Minister, ensuring that he had nothing to gain, and everything to lose, in this debate.
“The French are not in the countryside”
Satisfied to have finally overcome the obstacle, Gabriel Attal believes he has “ boosted the activists » and contributed to “rebalance” the political line considered too right-wing by the Macronist left wing since the vote on the immigration bill. “I am proud to disagree with [Jordan Bardella] and I will never accept that we consider that behind every immigrant there is a delinquent or a terrorist”, he repeats, while being aware that the match will have little effect on the European campaign. “It is not a debate which alone changes a dynamic, it is a whole”, he whispers.
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