His candidacy was no longer in doubt, but it comes in the midst of political instability. Former Prime Minister Edouard Philippe made his candidacy official for 2027, in an interview with the weekly The Point published Tuesday evening, stating: “I will be a candidate in the next presidential election.”. “I am preparing to propose things to the French. What I will propose will be massive. The French will decide.”explains the president of the Horizons party, Emmanuel Macron’s prime minister from 2017 to 2020.
Although the mayor of Le Havre’s ambitions for the Elysée were hardly a mystery, particularly given his constant popularity in the polls, Mr Philippe had never publicly stated his presence on the starting line in 2027. “It is often said that for a presidential election you should not want anything else. I agree with that.”insisted Mr. Philippe, saying he was ready, even in the event of an early presidential election.
On the substance, the former resident of Matignon evokes in particular four perils which France must face in the current period: the peril “democratic”the danger “budgetary”the danger of “immobility” and the danger of “public order and security”. From the result of the legislative elections, Mr. Philippe says he mainly remembers: “the ungovernable nature of an Assembly without any clear majority.” But also that in his eyes “The New Popular Front bloc is smaller than that of the central bloc.”
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Asked about Matignon and the Xavier Bertrand and Bernard Cazeneuve hypotheses, the mayor of Le Havre replied that he would support “any prime minister chosen in a political space that ranges from the conservative right to social democracy”. “All government parties should have as their primary objective to promote the stabilization of political life”Mr. Philippe urges again. A message addressed in particular to his former political family of the Republicans: “The right must get involved. By refusing to participate in this central bloc, it is pushing the whole thing towards the left.”.
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« Loyal but free »
Since 2020, Edouard Philippe has been busy ticking all the boxes for the ascent to the top election. Three years earlier, Emmanuel Macron, elected to the Elysée, entrusted Matignon to everyone’s surprise to this executive of the Republicans (LR), an ENA graduate, elected mayor of Le Havre in 2010.
The lease at Matignon was sometimes complicated, with the violent crisis of the “yellow vests”, and relations with the president, quickly delicate. They led to his replacement by Jean Castex in July 2020, after the first phase of the Covid-19 crisis, which earned Édouard Philippe notable popularity, a rare occurrence when leaving the rue de Varenne.
Since then, this 53-year-old state councilor with a slender figure, a beard that was initially brown, then salt and pepper and almost disappeared, who suffers from alopecia, has worked to prepare his candidacy, founding his own party, Horizons, at the end of 2021, even before Emmanuel Macron’s re-election campaign.
Kept in a tight grip in a relative majority, cultivating in the Assembly the credo « loyal but free » decreed by its boss, Horizons raised its voice after the dissolution, accentuating its financial independence while managing, a unique fact in the former majority, to maintain its number of deputies.
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Enough to allow Edouard Philippe to increasingly ostentatiously display his distance from the head of state. And to cultivate his singularity, even if it means provoking controversy by claiming to have shared a “cordial dinner” with Marine Le Pen last year, which allowed him to observe, he says, “very deep disagreements on many issues”.
Asked by Agence France-Presse, the Élysée did not make any comment.
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