While the President of the Republic is bogged down in his consultations to find a Prime Minister, Edouard Philippe is trying to take the lead. In an interview with the weekly The Point, Tuesday August 3, the mayor of Le Havre (Seine-Maritime) announced that he is “candidate for the next presidential election”.
The surprise statement is not one, Mr. Philippe has made no secret of his ambitions since leaving Matignon in the summer of 2020. But the tempo is unexpected and puts Emmanuel Macron under pressure, accentuating the image of a weakened head of state, now forced to watch the future being written without him.
Without ever naming him, Edouard Philippe also launched an attack against the current president, who was incapable of resolving the political crisis that he himself had triggered. Recalling “all the evil” what he thought of the dissolution of the National Assembly, he adds to his grievances Emmanuel Macron’s choice to thank Elisabeth Borne, on January 9, to replace her with Gabriel Attal, thus depriving himself of a way out the day after the European elections. “I had recommended to the President of the Republic to keep Elisabeth Borne, he confides. It was not [sa] decision. “
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But it is on the country’s budgetary situation that the candidate for the Elysée is most critical. “Nobody believes it!” he exclaims, regarding the 2024-2027 stability programme presented by the executive in Brussels in April of this year. “Our budgetary situation is one of the worst in Europe”continues the man who has made the reduction of public debt one of his political markers.
By declaring himself more than three years before the deadline, Edouard Philippe is fueling the trial by “individualism” what his detractors do to him. “While the current situation, the urgency, is to find stability (…), “declaring one’s candidacy does not seem to me to be really appropriate today”thus regretted, on LCI, the president of the Macronist senators, and faithful among the faithful of the head of state, François Patriat. “The providential man is rarely three years before a presidential election, just as love at first sight is rarely planned three weeks before a meeting.”adds a member of the government, who judges the timing of this declaration “lunar”.
Pompidolian gesture
” On the contrary, retorts MEP (Horizons) Nathalie Loiseau. The French are fed up with this political class that beats around the bush and doesn’t speak to them frankly. We’ve been having a shadow theater for weeks. Frankness and sincerity are always the right time.” Edouard Philippe, for his part, does not fail to position himself above the fray, denouncing “immobility” consubstantial with “ungovernable nature of a National Assembly without any clear majority”.
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