Emmanuel Macron assured Wednesday that Elisabeth Borne had all his “confidence”, the day after a reaction which appeared as a reframing of his Prime Minister on how to counter the National Rally. “I think that in fact we can no longer beat the far right in our democracies simply with historical and moral arguments”, said the French president to the press in Bratislava, while Elisabeth Borne had judged that the RN was an “heir of Pétain”. However, “I want to reiterate my full confidence in her here,” he added, assuring that it was his principle never to make any clarifications concerning her other than one-on-one.
Participants in Tuesday’s Council of Ministers reported that the Head of State seemed to have reframed his Prime Minister by affirming, in front of his troops, that the fight against the far right could no longer go through “moral arguments”. He was harshly criticized on Wednesday by the right and the left, who accused him of “trivializing” Marine Le Pen’s party.
“I have a simple mode of operation 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,” Emmanuel Macron said on Wednesday. “I never do it around the cabinet table, through the media,” he insisted.
The President of the Republic, however, reaffirmed to the press his position on the far right, recalling that he had twice beaten Marine Le Pen in the second round of the presidential election. “I have always considered that this fight was made in the name of values ??and was also made in the name of reality. And what I’ve always fought against is the lies and denials of reality that are used by the extremes, especially the far right,” he explained.
He felt that invoking “historical and moral arguments” was insufficient “because this extreme right has transformed” and “it has a lot of voters today who don’t vote for this history but vote because ‘they think ‘deep down, we haven’t tried that yet'”. “And so the fight against the far right is also a real, concrete fight. By reindustrializing the country, by telling the truth about public accounts, by carrying out courageous, sometimes unpopular reforms, when it has to be done, because the far right can only thrive on denial of reality,” he said. -He insists.
