FIGAROVOX/INTERVIEW – The former Prime Minister announced his candidacy for the 2027 presidential election on Tuesday evening. Édouard Philippe is thus seeking to anticipate the end of Emmanuel Macron’s five-year term, explains David Desgouilles, who draws a parallel with 1969.
David Desgouilles is a columnist at Marianne. He published Skid (ed. du Rocher, 2017) and Their lost wars (ed. du Rocher, 2019).
LE FIGARO. – The former prime minister took his close friends by surprise by jumping prematurely into the race for the Élysée. How should we interpret this timing?
David DESGOUILLES. – Édouard Philippe had already hinted on several occasions that he intended to be a candidate in the presidential election. From the creation of his movement – rather than joining LREM and then Renaissance – the intention was there: to take over from Emmanuel Macron at the end of the two terms.
By clearly renewing this intention among your colleagues in Pointat a time when the President of the Republic finds himself in very great difficulty after an imprudent dissolution, the former Prime Minister himself adding all the bad things he thinks about said dissolution, he clearly challenges Emmanuel Macron.
I have already had the opportunity to express in these columns that the constitutional reform of 2008, preventing three consecutive five-year terms, hinders the room for maneuver of the President of the Republic, because it allows the succession to be organized from the beginning of the second five-year term. Suffice to say that this phenomenon is encouraged, even multiplied, after a failed dissolution and the impossibility for the President to find a Prime Minister.
By officially declaring himself a presidential candidate now and even considering an early election, is the mayor of Le Havre giving credence to the idea that the head of state no longer has the means to relaunch his mandate?
He is ostentatiously turning the page on Macron, in fact, with a symbolic violence that we have not seen since the departure of François Hollande’s Minister of the Economy, torpedoing the latter’s candidacy and preparing his own.
In January 1969, Georges Pompidou, dismissed from Matignon in the summer of 1968, declared himself a candidate while General de Gaulle still had three and a half years of his mandate to serve. Can we draw a parallel between these two profiles and these two announcements?
Indeed, there are common points with this appeal launched from Rome by Georges Pompidou, shortly before the 1969 referendum, which had been planned since the previous summer. By suggesting at that precise moment that he would be a candidate in the next presidential election, Georges Pompidou sent the French the message that the departure of General de Gaulle would not be so serious since he was there to take over; and he removed all the gravity of a Gaullist defeat from a referendum. Many orthodox Gaullists subsequently accused Georges Pompidou of having thus precipitated the defeat, even more than the “yes, but” of Valéry Giscard d’Estaing.
Edouard Philippe sends this message not to the French people questioned in a referendum but to the parliamentarians of the central bloc: you can censor or weaken the governments appointed by Emmanuel Macron as much as you want and push him to resign, I will be there to support this candidacy.
That said, the comparison ends there, because the De Gaulle-Pompidou duo left a greater mark on the history of the Fifth Republic than the Macron-Philippe duo. Forgive me, but the level was not the same.
