Emmanuel Macron said Tuesday during the Council of Ministers that the far right should not be fought “with moral arguments”, participants reported. A way of distancing himself from his Prime Minister. On Sunday, she judged that the National Rally was the “heir of Pétain”, on Radio J. “You will not be able to make millions of French people who voted for the far right believe that they are fascists” , launched the Head of State in the presence of his Prime Minister, according to these participants who confirm comments reported by Le Parisien and Le Figaro.
“The President of the Republic never reframes the Prime Minister in the Council of Ministers”, assured the Elysée to AFP to minimize this new dissonance between the two heads of the executive while speculation is rife on a next government reshuffle.
In an interview broadcast on Sunday by Radio J, the head of government attacked the National Rally, which she said did not believe in “normalization”. “I think you shouldn’t trivialize your ideas, your ideas are always the same. So now, the National Rally is putting the forms in it, but I continue to think that it is a dangerous ideology”, she judged, assuring that the party of Marine Le Pen and Jordan Bardella was “heir” of Philippe Pétain, head of the Vichy regime who collaborated with Nazi Germany.
“The fight against the far right no longer involves moral arguments,” assured President Macron in the Council of Ministers. According to him, “we must discredit” the RN “by the substance and the inconsistencies” rather than by “words from the 1990s that no longer work”.
Not everyone around the Council of Ministers table saw Emmanuel Macron’s words as a “frontal attack” against Elisabeth Borne. “We have a lack of arguments” to counter the RN, said a government source, deploring the use of “the same arguments as in 2002”, when Jean-Marie Le Pen, founder of the National Front, had for the first time led his camp in the second round of the presidential election.
The President and the Prime Minister then had lunch alone at the Élysée, as they do every week.
Emmanuel Macron had already estimated in the past that it was necessary to “respond to the challenges of the country” to stem the rise of the RN. “Marine Le Pen will come” to power “if we do not know how to respond to the challenges of the country and if we install a habit of lying or denial of reality”, he said at the end of April in Le Parisien.
This apparent divergence on the best way to counter the far right comes as Emmanuel Macron and Élisabeth Borne have already had conflicting messages on the attitude to adopt towards the unions after the adoption of the pension reform.
