what is the point of circulating names?

Still no Prime Minister, Emmanuel Macron invites political parties, excluding RN and LFI, on Tuesday to move forward. Several names of possible candidates for Matignon are circulating, pushed behind the scenes by those around him or by the Élysée.

François Bayrou, Bernard Cazeneuve, Sébastien Lecornu, Catherine Vautrin, Didier Migaud, Bruno Retailleau, François Barouin, or even David Lisnard, the list of potential candidates for Matignon is already long, a week after the fall of the government of Michel Barnier, overthrown by a motion of censure, Wednesday December 4. Names repeated in the media, but which according to an advisor are not “only wind“: no one knows who will be appointed by the president. The latter invites the political forces on Tuesday, December 10 to the Élysée to move forward on “a method” in order to constitute the future government – without LFI, nor the RN.

To circulate these names, all you have to do is make phone calls to a few influential journalists to talk, for example, about the current news, and then out of nowhere, the interlocutor mentions his candidate himself and talks about how it is the best choice. For François Bayrou, for example, we hear three arguments a lot: he sponsored Marine Le Pen in 2022, he pushes proportionalism and he was acquitted. These are what we call elements of language that those around him share behind the scenes.

What’s the point? There is that of the interested parties themselves who dream of Matignon or of their loved ones who think about the future and the positions they could occupy, and that of the Élysée which tests names. In both cases, it is a way of testing the waters, of seeing how the proposal is received, on TV sets, by the editorialists. In the case of the president and his entourage, it is a way of seeing how the other parties react, if there is an outcry that would lead to censorship. Last summer, the Xavier Bertrand track was abandoned as soon as the RN vetoed it.

It’s all about strategy. Some people sometimes support a name to harm it or another potential candidate. For example, sources assure us that the deputy Gérald Darmanin, Ensemble pour la République, and the leader of the Macronists in the Assembly Gabriel Attal are pushing the resigning minister Catherine Vautrin, a former LR, to weaken a man who nevertheless comes from their own camp, but who can become a potential rival for the 2027 presidential election: Sébastien Lecornu. Gabriel Attal’s entourage talks about “unfounded rumors”. Many people know that the more a name circulates, the more likely it is to be eliminated. Proof of this: the names of Élisabeth Borne, Gabriel Attal, Michel Barnier only came up insistently at the very last minute, just before their appointment.