Elisabeth Borne demanded “unity” from the majority on Sunday in Tourcoing (North) during the political return of Gérald Darmanin, where she invited herself in extremis after two weeks of political and media offensive by the Minister of the Interior. .
“The time ahead of us must be entirely devoted to action and intense substantive work to produce results. This is how we will fight populists and extremes, leaving them their demagogic recipes”, launched the Prime Minister at the conclusion of the day organized by the Minister of the Interior in the Botanical Garden of her electoral stronghold.
“Our unity is our strength, we must protect it at all costs, it is the condition for continuing to act and not paving the way to extremes ourselves. This unity, behind the President of the Republic and his project, j ‘I want it, I watch over it and I am the guarantor, as leader of the majority,’ insisted Elisabeth Borne.
It was only on Saturday that the Prime Minister announced her arrival in the North, where Mr. Darmanin was organizing his first political comeback, a few weeks after having failed to succeed him at Matignon.
The ex-LR had set the scene at the start of the day by explaining that he did not want to let Marine Le Pen “go irretrievably to power”, a hypothesis already deemed “fairly probable” on Friday in the columns of La Voix du Nord.
The staging had been neat – about 700 people, eleven ministers, several dozen parliamentarians from the majority and a few elected LR -, as much as the theme: the “popular classes”, forgotten by the government party and even the majority, according to the minister. Dozens of speakers, mainly elected officials, followed one another to address different aspects (work, safety, ecology).
Until the slip from the president of the Provence-Alpes-Côte-d’Azur region, Renaud Muselier, ex-leader of the Republicans like Mr. Darmanin, who gave him “Mr. Prime Minister” … before going catch up with the branches in front of an audience that was at first embarrassed, then hilarious.
“I really had not planned to spend this last weekend of August in Tourcoing” for this “informal event”, began the Prime Minister, who arrived at the end of the afternoon.
If “the question of the far right and its progression in our democracies is at the heart of our reflections”, “we can be proud of what has been accomplished for six years”, she argued, shelling the Emmanuel Macron’s record since 2017.
But we must “remain humble”, “because difficulties persist and the French are asking us to do more and better”, added Ms. Borne, who also paid tribute to the Minister of the Economy, Bruno Le Maire.
Before her, Mr. Darmanin had again put forward “the only valid question, the social question”.
“We can clearly see that the social condition of workers, employees, civil servants, craftsmen, tradesmen, in a word, workers, is a matter of great concern, that doubt has long settled in them and their children. “, he judged.
“We also see that some French people from working-class backgrounds are now massively abstaining from the elections and have sent dozens of parliamentarians from the National Rally to the Assembly. Not, I personally think, out of conviction alone, but because let them once again give a wake-up call to those who govern them,” he continued.
“The solution is not in a technical response, but first in the behavior of the woman or the politician, in a certain disposition to listen”, said Mr. Darmanin who, for the rest, widely defended, like the Prime Minister, the record of the executive.
With his recent statements, the tenant of Place Beauvau had seemed to accelerate the timetable for the succession of Emmanuel Macron, causing tensions within the majority.
27/08/2023 19:22:04 – Tourcoing (AFP) – © 2023 AFP
