Elisabeth Borne assured Thursday, June 1 to have “a very fluid relationship” with Emmanuel Macron, after several days of hesitation in the executive couple around the response to be made to the National Rally (RN).
“Everything is going very well”, hammered the latter on the sidelines of a trip to Laval, saying she wanted to “act to meet the priorities of the French”. “The rest is a storm in a teacup,” added the head of government, as the head of state seemed to blow hot and cold at his prime minister.
During the Council of Ministers, Mr. Macron said on Tuesday that the far right should not be fought “by moral arguments”, but by “the substance” and “the concrete” forty-eight hours after the declarations of his Prime Minister on an RN “heir of Pétain” carrying a “dangerous ideology” and whose ideas should not be “trivialized”. However, “I want to repeat my full confidence in her here,” he assured the next day in Bratislava, adding that he had a principle of never making any clarifications concerning her other than one-on-one.
Macron accused of “trivializing” the RN
Mr. Macron’s remarks caused a strong reaction: right and left on Wednesday accused Emmanuel Macron of “trivializing” the RN. The most virulent charge came from Olivier Marleix, the boss of the Les Républicains deputies, who presents himself as an heir to Gaullism and who castigated Public Senate for “unwelcome” remarks from the Head of State. He notably recalled that Emmanuel Macron had been elected in 2017 and re-elected five years later in the second round against Marine Le Pen thanks to the “republican dam”, ensuring that the “demonization” of the RN had indeed allowed him to access the Elysée and to be renewed there last year.
“Now that he is no longer re-eligible, come and tell us that after him finally the deluge, I find that extremely unhealthy on his part (…)”, got carried away the elected LR, denouncing a “quite incredible cynicism from the Head of State. Faced with remarks that he denounces as a “trivialization” of the far right, Mr. Marleix took pains to recall that among the founding members of the National Front, which became the National Rally, was Pierre Bousquet, who “was an officer of the Waffen SS”.
Remarks shared by Xavier Bertrand, the LR president of the Hauts-de-France region, who also called not to forget the “history” of the RN so as not to contribute to its trivialization.