Borne "no longer has the credit" to govern, judge Le Pen

April 11, 2023

Elisabeth Borne no longer has “credit” to govern, said Marine Le Pen on Tuesday at the end of an interview at Matignon with the head of government, who is consulting all over the place to get out of the pension crisis.

“Today the Prime Minister, incontestably, no longer has the credit with the French, with the representatives that we are, to be able to calmly lead a government”, affirmed the leader of the National Rally deputies, after a meeting of 45 minutes.

President Emmanuel Macron “should have reworked (…) the day after” the motion of censure tabled after the 49.3 used on the pension reform. This motion rejected by only 9 votes, “should have pushed her (Mme Borne, editor’s note) to propose her resignation”, according to the far-right leader.

Asked about the arrest in The Hague of Emmanuel Macron by opponents of the pension reform, Marine Le Pen considered that the use of Article 49.3 of the Constitution, which allowed the adoption without a vote of the pension reform pensions, “will remain a real trauma”.

“The democratic game has collapsed” because “this reform should not have passed”, she insisted. “It will remain a deep scar in the same way perhaps, in terms of intensity, as the 2005 referendum”. Mrs Le Pen was referring to the referendum which had led to the rejection of the idea of a European Constitution, a project nevertheless reinstated in broad outline in the Lisbon Treaty of 2007.

“There are markers like that that make an increasingly large part of the French feel that there is no longer a proper democratic functioning in our country,” she added.

The far-right leader also criticized the “slowdown in the parliamentary calendar” and the “rhythm of the texts presented to the National Assembly” mentioned, according to her, by Ms. Borne: “I am not sure that this is the right medicine to treat the democratic crisis,” she said.

She reminded the Prime Minister of the “absolute emergencies” to which the government should in her view respond: “food inflation”, “the public order project”, and “medical deserts”.