It all started with a short sentence uttered by Elisabeth Borne this weekend explaining that the National Rally is “the heir of Pétain. It did not take more for the Prime Minister to trigger a wave of indignation among the executives of the far-right party, Marine Le Pen and Jordan Bardella at the head. Finally, even the President of the Republic got involved to reframe his head of government. Back to the latest controversy in the French political world.
“Petain’s heir”
It was in an interview with Radio J broadcast on Sunday that Elisabeth Borne issued a categorical opinion on the French far-right party. “I do not believe at all in the normalization of the National Rally. 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 declared before recalling that the party is “the heir of Pétain. »
The Prime Minister also targeted the heiress of the former National Front, affirming that she “never heard Marine Le Pen denounce what may have been the historical positions of her party and I think that a change of name does not change the ideas, the roots. The head of government also judged that there was “obvious proximity” between the RN and Vladimir Putin. ” Whether [Marine Le Pen] wants to rewrite history, we don’t have to fall into this trap. This proximity exists and cannot be erased, ”she said.
“Infamous remarks”
An attack in good and due form which provoked the ire of the main interested party. “Elisabeth Borne’s remarks about the National Rally are infamous and unworthy. They are not acceptable with regard to the first opposition party, its 88 deputies, its thousands of elected officials and the millions of French people it represents! “, protested Marine Le Pen on Twitter.
His message was published a few minutes after that of party president Jordan Bardella, who also rose up using the same arguments. “By making such serious, misleading and insulting remarks, Elisabeth Borne insults the first opposition party and smears the millions of French people who vote for the RN”, he stormed.
“Élisabeth Borne is both uneducated, unworthy and incapable”, also criticized Sébastien Chenu in Political Questions (France Inter / France Info / Le Monde). “Uncultured because she forgets that in the history of the National Front, people founded it like Georges Bidault, President of the Council and resistant, like Michel de Camaret, resistant”, affirmed the elected representative of the North. The RN deputy, however, forgot to specify that Pierre Bousquet, a former Waffen-SS, also participated in the founding of the National Front in 1972.
Reframing of the President of the Republic
The story did not stop there. It would seem that the words of Elisabeth Borne have moved even in the highest spheres of the Republic. During the Council of Ministers on Tuesday, it was Emmanuel Macron in person who came to reframe his Prime Minister. “You will not be able to make millions of French people who voted for the extreme right believe that they are fascists”, launched the head of state, according to several participants.
“The fight against the far right no longer involves moral arguments,” assured the president. According to him, “we must discredit” the RN “by the substance and the inconsistencies” rather than by “words from the 90s which no longer work. “However, he made a point of recalling the next day, Wednesday, that his Prime Minister still has “all his confidence. »
Jordan Bardella nevertheless took the opportunity to ask Elisabeth Borne to apologize for statements which, according to him, “shocked many French people”. For her part, the executive vice-president of Reconquête!, Marion Maréchal, denounced “the intellectual poverty” of the “cheesy” statements of the Prime Minister, giving “right” to Emmanuel Macron for distancing himself from them.
And cascading reviews
This positioning of the President of the Republic immediately triggered a wave of indignation, on the right as on the left. The most virulent charge came from Olivier Marleix, the boss of the Les Républicains deputies, who notably recalled that Emmanuel Macron had been elected in 2017 and re-elected five years later in the second round against Marine Le Pen thanks to the “dam republican”, ensuring that the “demonization” of the RN had indeed allowed him to access the Elysée and to be renewed there last year. “Now that he is no longer re-eligible, come and tell us that after him finally the deluge, I find that extremely unhealthy on his part”, got carried away the elected LR, denouncing a “quite incredible cynicism” of the from the Head of State.
Remarks shared by Xavier Bertrand, the 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. The reframing of the Prime Minister illustrates again the deterioration of the relationship between the two heads of the executive. To the point that for some, on the left, the head of state has 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. “Within the opposition, it is ultimately only the far right that has spared Emmanuel Macron.