In full preparation for the return to politics of his party, the National Rally, which will be held in Beaucaire in the Gard, Friday 15 and Saturday 16 September, Jordan Bardella became aware of the river interview of the President of the Republic in our columns.

Exclusively, he responds in Le Point by accepting, “without illusions”, the invitation of the Head of State to come and meet him with all the other opposition forces in order to “build agreements” on various subjects. The young party president and future head of the list not yet declared to the Europeans reads there a belated realization by the Head of State of his lack of a majority in the National Assembly. Like the admission of a lack of clear direction at the top of the country.

Le Point: In his interview, the Head of State details his “major initiative” for the start of the school year: meeting with all the opposition forces in order to “build agreements” on subjects as broad as the independence of our country, family, school, universal national service, the transmission of our culture, our language, the regulation of screens or our territorial and institutional organization… Are you going to participate?

Jordan Bardella: Since the start of the term, we have defended the approach of a firm but constructive opposition, capable of supporting measures that improve the daily lives of French people, wherever they come from. We were able to accompany legislative texts which emanated from groups other than ours, including certain texts of the majority, such as the purchasing power law, even if we judged that it was not sufficient.

It is in this spirit that I responded favorably to Emmanuel Macron’s invitation, because the National Rally is not sectarian and because it respects the institutions. But I have no illusions about this initiative, which is part of the long line of “great debates” without a future and “refoundations” that never happen. We will not be the crutch of a president looking for a second wind. What is notable, however, is that Emmanuel Macron finally realizes that he does not have an absolute majority, and that the French people put his project in a relative minority on the evening of June 19. Belated awareness, but salutary.

Emmanuel Macron aims to “significantly reduce immigration”. To do this, he asks the Minister of the Interior to “exchange with all the opposition forces that go in the same direction and to build the most effective project possible”. Are you ready to cooperate with the government on the subject of immigration? If so, under what conditions?

Between what he aims to do verbally, and what he has been doing since 2017, there is an absolutely gaping gap, which reveals a lack of political sincerity. We have the permanent feeling, with Emmanuel Macron, of a form of deception on the goods. The truth of his record is that he is the president of all records for immigration, legal and illegal, and it’s the official statistics from the Home Office that say so.

Moreover, when the President of the Republic answers in the negative to the question: “Are we overwhelmed by immigration? », I think he shows his incomprehension of the subject and his disconnection from the field. Ask the French how they overwhelmingly answer this question! The role of the President of the Republic should be to preserve the great demographic balances of our country. Basically, in the debate on immigration, we have a precedence recognized by all, a particular authority.

For the Head of State, the riots of last June are less the cause of foreigners in France than of a “mechanism of decivilization”, emphasizing that “the people who are most in secession from our values ??are often born with us.” What inspires you?

This inspires me with a total denial of reality. The days of riots that France experienced surpassed the riots of 2005 in the intensity of their violence, the amount of damage caused and the number of police officers and gendarmes injured. They also showed that formerly preserved territories also had their pockets of communitarianism and delinquency, their “difficult neighborhoods”, as we say modestly…

They allow us to observe an immigration which has not been assimilated and, worse, which violently contests our way of life, our mores and our values. There are, on our soil, individuals to whom France has given everything, and who thank her with a spit in the face. How can we do this and continue to welcome hundreds of thousands of immigrants every year? How can we make this observation and maintain jus soli, which allows individuals to acquire French nationality without feeling deeply French? As the late Hélène Carrère d’Encausse said, “One shouldn’t become French inadvertently. What these barbaric riots reveal is both the collapse of state authority, the existence of judicial impunity that encourages acting out and recidivism, and the persistence of an anti-French sentiment which is expressed in bursts of violence at the slightest pretext.

A few months before the European elections, Emmanuel Macron judges that the continent is facing an existential question, in particular a “questioning of democracy”. Is this the divide in the coming ballot, do you see another emerging?

I do not believe that the democratic model is called into question in the European Union. Viscerally attached to democracy, the peoples of Europe contest a form of secession from their political elites, who believe they can step over them on the subjects of their daily lives. On the contrary, the peoples of Europe are fighting for a fairer representativeness of democracy, for greater inclusion of citizens in decision-making, for greater transparency in debates. They want to reclaim politics.

What does this long interview with the Head of State say, a year after his re-election for a second term?

What this long interview says is that the President of the Republic no longer really knows in which direction he wants to lead the country. The case of the school is emblematic of this: after removing mathematics from the common core, the government reinstated it; after having imposed a reform of the baccalaureate which nobody wanted, and noting the disaster it entailed, he will finally come back to it.

This government digs holes, then fills them up, and this grotesque exercise takes the place of politics. What I also notice in this interview are his absences: at no time were the words “purchasing power” and “inflation” mentioned. At a time when food inflation and the rise in prices at the pump are eating away at people’s purchasing power, but also their confidence in the value of work and the fair remuneration of effort, it is absences that speak for themselves. long on the loose link between the President of the Republic and the real life of the French.

Find our interview with Emmanuel Macron in 5 parts:

1/5: Emmanuel Macron: “On school, we must get out of French hypocrisies”

2/5: Emmanuel Macron: “I will talk to Vladimir Putin again when it is useful”

3/5: Emmanuel Macron: “I can’t be satisfied with an unemployment rate of 7%! »

4/5: Emmanuel Macron: “We must work to recivilize”

5/5: Emmanuel Macron: “I will preside until the last quarter of an hour”