The dissolution of the National Assembly, decided by the President of the Republic Emmanuel Macron following the European elections, shook up the emancipation strategy of former Prime Minister Édouard Philippe. She accelerated the timetable while the president of the Horizons party, partner of the presidential camp, was preparing “in a relaxed but serious way”having made numerous trips to France for several months.
“I read, I meet people, I try to think, I try to propose, I travel abroad,” he wrote in January on France Bleu, before taking a further step towards a candidacy for the 2027 presidential election planned for the start of the school year in September.
Under the shock of the dissolution, Édouard Philippe announced the break with Emmanuel Macron, whom he had joined in 2017. “It is the President of the Republic who killed the presidential majority (…). He decided to dissolve it, fine, we move on, and something else, it can’t be the same thing as before. So it’s creating a new parliamentary majority which will operate on different bases.” he declared on TF1 on June 20. Since that date, the mayor of Le Havre has repeated in each of his speeches, such as on Wednesday June 26 on France Inter, that he is ” attached to (son) independence “.
A “wider, more stable and more open” central space
In this circumstance, distinguishing himself from the Macronist label, which arouses significant rejection among the French, allows him to give more chances to the 82 Horizons candidates invested in the legislative elections. He will support them almost every day in their respective constituencies. But how many will be elected on June 30 and July 7? Will they be able to reconstitute a political group in the National Assembly, to weigh in on future parliamentary balances, or even, beyond that, to create momentum for the 2027 meeting?
Édouard Philippe wants to believe that his claimed independence is not “an isolation”but in the contrary “the way to build with others” and « espace central » different on the remains of Macronism. “I don’t want to build the same thing but something that is wider, more stable and more open”he reaffirmed on Wednesday June 26 on France Inter. In May, before the dissolution, he planned to unite for 2027 a “conservative right” and an “Mitterrandian left”.
A hand extended to the right and the social democrats
The ambition remained the same after the dissolution. The former prime minister wants to work with political forces which were in the outgoing majority and with forces which had chosen not to be there. He thus wants to open himself up to a “left that exists, which has expressed itself around Raphaël Glucksmannthat is to say, a pro-European left, which does not renounce the market economy but which knows that it must be regulated, a left which can and is used to discussing”. But the outstretched hand has remained unanswered for the moment.
Only the former socialist mayor of Paris, Bertrand Delanoë, gives clear support to Pierre-Yves Bournazel, Paris councillor and deputy general secretary of Horizons, against the outgoing deputy of La France insoumise Aymeric Caron, who beat him in the 18th constituency of the capital in 2022.
Édouard Philippe’s message is also addressed to his former political family, Les Républicains, with sometimes a blow to the cohesion of the presidential coalition campaign. In a video, the boss of Horizons supports the LR mayor of Saint-Maur-des-Fossés Sylvain Berrios against the outgoing Renaissance deputy Frédéric Descrozaille. On the ground, local LR elected officials conversely support Horizons candidates.
But at the national level, it is too early to observe movements of recomposition. The LR president of the Hauts-de-France region, Xavier Bertrand, rejected the outstretched hand of Édouard Philippe, instead defending “a fourth offer” pour “avoid both the RN, the Popular Front and the Macronist status quo”. According to him, “The more MPs there are that I call independent, who are not from Macron’s party, the more we will be able to impose cohabitation and change.”
Find, as soon as they are officially published, the results of the first round of the 2024 legislative elections, municipality by municipality.
