In 2007, when Nicolas Sarkozy foreshadowed Emmanuel Macron
In this live broadcast devoted to the news of the electoral campaign, we are also going to evoke the past by returning each day to the highlights of the last presidential elections through an article by the World. Today, let’s go back fifteen years… February 7, 2007.
At Nicolas Sarkozy, there is then something very Macronian. The right, the left? Divide exceeded, according to the UMP presidential candidate, who promises to be “opening chair”. In this way, according to our colleague Philippe Ridet, he pursues three objectives: “Take advantage of a certain disarray caused in his camp by Ségolène Royal, who is struggling to bring together the entire Socialist Party (…) ; integrate part of the strategy of François Bayrou, who is successful in wishing to bring together left and right in the same government; and, finally, appear as an “off-system” candidate. »
Something Macronian, too, in the quest for a direct relationship with the French: Nicolas Sarkozy took part, on February 5, 2007, in the premiere of “I have a question to ask you”, a TF1 program which confronts him with voters – an exercise also prized by the current Head of State, who did not hesitate to say that he wanted “fuck the unvaccinated” to readers of Parisian, early January. That evening in 2007, Mr. Sarkozy was no more reluctant to use a shock formula, affirming that, “in France, you are not polygamous, you don’t slaughter sheep in your bathtub”. Does a participant in the evening, from an immigrant background, feel insulted? “You are not Algerian and I am not Hungarian”, replies the future president with unmistakable oratorical ease.
The resemblance continues even in the management of time and hats, at this perilous moment when the president of the UMP, already a candidate in the campaign, is still Minister of the Interior at work.“It will not be said that a single Frenchman thinks that I chose between my job and my ambition”, he assures. The Macron camp could not say better, which has been repeating over and over for weeks that the crises in Ukraine and the Covid are mobilizing its champion much more urgently than the re-election for which he is still not a candidate.