Tensions persist at the top of the state. In 24 hours, Emmanuel Macron blew hot and cold on his relationship with Elisabeth Borne, reviving doubts about his ability to stay at Matignon as she began to play a little more personal music after the pension crisis.
“A distance has settled” between the two heads of the executive, sums up a majority executive. This time it focuses on the strategy to adopt against the far right. Before the government meeting on Tuesday in the Council of Ministers, the president reframed his Prime Minister after his statements on the National Rally “heir to Pétain”. His words leaked to the press, giving the image of a head of state publicly lecturing the head of government.
Macron assures Borne of his “confidence”
Then on Wednesday, Emmanuel Macron assured her of “all (his) confidence”, while giving back his arguments: impossible to beat the far right simply “with historical and moral arguments”. A relative of the Head of State, however, evokes “a pool game with several bands of those who want Borne to leave and are afraid that she will stay”. It is in this part of the majority that those who disseminated Emmanuel Macron’s remarks in the media would be found.
The president “assured me of his confidence and declared that if he had had anything to say to me, he would have said it face to face. Some, obviously, must have misunderstood”, relativized the Prime Minister in an interview with West France posted Wednesday evening. “I have a roadmap and I’m sticking to it”, the idea of a ministerial reshuffle or even a dissolution “is not the subject of the day”, she added.
Some within the executive, however, considered the Head of State’s remarks “violent”, given the personal history of the Prime Minister, whose father never recovered from deportation and put an end to to her days when she was 11 years old. These dissonances at the top of the executive are in addition to those on 49.3, which Elisabeth Borne no longer wanted to use after having narrowly escaped censorship, on the unions which she does not want to “rush”, or on the immigration law that she wanted to present in the fall but will have to design before July 14.
Breaking the image of a “cold technocrat”
Political scientist Bruno Cautrès sees this for his part as “an expression of dissatisfaction” by the Head of State with regard to his Prime Minister who, for her part, “wants to show that she is not the cold technocrat who imposes on the country an unpopular reform” and wants to “restore a little depth to his character.
In the meantime, Elisabeth Borne is working to roll out her roadmap, halfway through the 100 days that the president has given her to turn the page on pensions. With in the background a little social and ecological music from the left wing of the macronie, from which the former adviser to Lionel Jospin comes.