Emmanuel Macron assured Wednesday that Elisabeth Borne had all his “confidence”, after having seemed to reframe his Prime Minister on how to counter the National Rally (RN) and to have drawn severe criticism on the right and on the left.
“I want here to repeat all my confidence in him”, declared the head of state in front of the press who questioned him during a trip to Bratislava.
“When I have things to say to the Prime Minister for six years, I say it in a singular colloquium from which nothing comes out and we settle things together,” he said. “I never do it around the table of the Council of Ministers, through the media.”
A development supposed to dissipate the impression of reframing born of remarks which he precisely held Tuesday in the Council of Ministers, and which had been reported to the press by participants. And this while speculation is rife on the deterioration of relations between the two heads of the executive.
While Elisabeth Borne had estimated during the weekend that the RN was an “heir of Pétain” carrying a “dangerous ideology” and whose ideas should not be “trivialized”, Emmanuel Macron had called on Tuesday not to fight the extreme right “by moral arguments” but by “the substance” and “the concrete”.
These declarations had been strongly criticized by the other oppositions.
The most virulent charge came from Olivier Marleix, boss of the Les Républicains deputies, who presents himself as an heir to Gaullism and castigated the “unwelcome” remarks of the Head of State on Public Senate.
He recalled that the “republican dam” and the “demonization” of the RN had allowed Emmanuel Macron to be elected in 2017 and re-elected five years later in the second round against Marine Le Pen.
“Now that he is no longer re-eligible, coming to tell us that after him finally the deluge, I find it extremely unhealthy”, he got carried away, denouncing a “quite incredible cynicism”.
A position shared by Xavier Bertrand, 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.
If he assured that he was not in the habit of cropping his Prime Minister in public or even in the Council of Ministers, Emmanuel Macron nevertheless assumed on Wednesday a position distinct from that of Elisabeth Borne.
He even went further than Tuesday by saying that we could “no longer beat” the far right “simply with historical and moral arguments” — the term “historic” referring directly to the reference to Philippe Pétain, the leader of the Vichy regime which collaborated with Nazi Germany.
According to him, these arguments are insufficient “because this extreme right has changed” and “there are many voters today who do not vote for this story but vote because they say to themselves, we haven’t tried this yet”.
In any case, this new episode revives speculation about a possible upcoming change of Prime Minister, while several executives from the presidential camp report constant annoyance from Emmanuel Macron at the limits of his government.
For some, on the left, the head of state has even come to ignore the personal history of Elisabeth Borne.
The first secretary of the PS Olivier Faure thus recalled on Twitter that Elisabeth Borne was the daughter of a Holocaust survivor and that she was legitimate to recall “the filiation of the far right”.
Green MEP David Cormand advised the head of government on Twitter to resign after “such a disavowal on such a fundamental point”.
An observation that the Minister of the Economy Bruno Le Maire does not share, who denied, on the contrary, any presidential disavowal.
In his eyes, Elisabeth Borne is “perfectly founded” to recall historical facts. And it is possible to do so “while fighting the RN on its proposals and ideas”, he added.
Within the opposition, it is ultimately only the far right that has spared Emmanuel Macron. Like Jordan Bardella, the president of the National Rally, who preferred to ask Elisabeth Borne to apologize for statements which, according to him, “shocked many French people”
05/31/2023 13:52:14 – Paris (AFP) – © 2023 AFP
