Emmanuel Macron is looking for a candidate for Matignon, Édouard Philippe is seeking his succession at the Élysée. By formalizing, in the midst of a political crisis, his candidacy for the “next presidential election”, the former Prime Minister is outlining the perspective of the post-Macron period, without excluding an early end of mandate.
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Former Prime Minister Edouard Philippe on June 20 in Paris. Photo: AFP/VNA/CVN
“A sense of timing. A sense of priorities,” quickly reacted the leader of the Ecologists, Marine Tondelier. While consultations continue interminably at the Élysée to resolve the crisis born of the dissolution and the legislative elections, Édouard Philippe confirms the grand design that has occupied him since leaving Matignon in 2020, and for which he founded his own party, Horizons: the succession of Emmanuel Macron.
“I will be a candidate in the next presidential election,” confirmed the mayor of Le Havre in an interview with Le Point published on Tuesday evening, September 3.
When questioned, the former protégé of Alain Juppé also “confirms” that he is ready in the perspective of an early presidential election. A hypothesis that floats in the atmosphere of the French political class, with an Assembly without a majority and an unprecedented institutional crisis in the Fifth Republic to which Emmanuel Macron is supposed to respond by appointing a Prime Minister.
“It’s not a surprise. He has already said that he is preparing, everyone knows that. He says things. It’s not tomorrow, he is preparing and will be a candidate in the next presidential election,” explains a member of his entourage.
“We are living in an unprecedented moment, difficult for everyone, for the French, for the head of state, for the former majority”. “Showing individualism”, “when the current situation, the urgency, is to find stability”, and “declaring one’s candidacy does not seem really appropriate to me today”, reacted on LCI the president of the Macronist group in the Senate, François Patriat.
When contacted, the Élysée did not make any comment.
“Loyal but free”
The ambitions of Édouard Philippe for the Elysée were indeed hardly in doubt, as he has worked to tick all the boxes for his rise to the top election since leaving Matignon in 2020.
Three years earlier, Emmanuel Macron, elected to the Élysée, entrusted Matignon to everyone’s surprise to this executive of the Republicans (LR), a graduate of the ENA, elected mayor of Le Havre in 2010.
The lease at Matignon was sometimes complicated, with the violent crisis of the “yellow vests”, and relations with the president, quickly delicate. They led to his replacement by Jean Castex in July 2020, after the first phase of the COVID crisis which earned Édouard Philippe a notable popularity, rare when leaving the rue de Varenne.
Since then, this 53-year-old state councilor with a slender figure, a beard that was initially brown, then salt and pepper and almost disappeared – he suffers from alopecia – has worked to prepare his candidacy, founding his own party, Horizons, at the end of 2021, even before Emmanuel Macron’s re-election campaign.
Held in a cramped position in a relative majority, cultivating in the Assembly the credo “loyal but free” decreed by its boss, Horizons raised its voice after the dissolution, accentuating its financial independence while managing, a unique fact in the former majority, to retain its number of deputies.
Enough to allow Édouard Philippe to increasingly ostentatiously display his distance from the head of state. And to cultivate his singularity, even if it means provoking controversy by claiming to have shared a “cordial dinner” with Marine Le Pen last year, which allowed him to note, he says, “very profound disagreements on many subjects”.
The man who had declared himself a “man of the right” on the steps of Matignon in 2017 has been advocating since 2022 a coalition with his former party, the Republicans, a political base that he hopes to see broadened in his conquest of power to a section of the social democrats, once described as the “Mitterandian left”.
In Le Point, when asked about Xavier Bertrand and Bernard Cazeneuve, Édouard Philippe explains that he supports “any Prime Minister chosen in a political space that goes from the conservative right to social democracy”. And takes the opportunity to emphasize his favorite themes, such as education, public order, and especially the public finance crisis. The opportunity to address a severe criticism of the management of the outgoing government and its objectives of stabilizing the deficit at 3% in 2027 which “no one believes in”.
AFP/VNA/CVN
