https://twitter.com/PaulLarrouturou/status/1803851311861108864Édouard Philippe saying that Macron ‘has killed the presidential majority’ and that it’s time to ‘move on’ and ‘create a new parliamentary majority working on a different basis that the previous one’. He is breaking with Macron and already planning his 2027 presidential bid.
Shortly thereafter, Bruno Le Maire, the finance minister,
criticized in strong terms in a TV interview the inner circle of Macron.
The parquet floors of ministries and palaces of the Republic are full of woodlice. There always have been woodlice, it is part of the French political life… They are in the parquet floors, in the parquet grooves. It is very hard to get rid of them. The best is to not listening to them and remaining at your place whether one is president, prime minister, minister and taking decisions in full knowledge.
The unnamed targets of Le Maire are Pierre Charron and Bruno Roger-Petit, two presidential advisers who reportedly encouraged Macron to dissolve the National Assembly. Charron is a former Sarkozyist senator for Paris currently acting as an unofficial presidential adviser. He is mostly known in the press for engaging in gossip and is a worthy representative of the Parisian Right, a permanent laughing stock of French politics since the Tiberi era which is dedicating more time for petty feuds and personal rivalries (case in point: in the 2023 senatorial election, the official LR list in Paris faced two dissident lists, one led by Charron who didn’t get reelected) than trying to constitute an effective challenge to the PS dominance in the capital. Roger-Petit is a second-tier and fairly mediocre journalist who started as a PS supporter but became later a Macron sycophant and was rewarded with a job of ‘presidential adviser for remembrance’. He is said to be very close to Brigitte Macron and to have inspired the reactionary turn of the Macron presidency, enjoying ties with far-right circles, notably Pascal Praud, the star columnist on Bolloré’s CNews TV station who, according to
Le Monde, was informed by Roger-Petit about the dissolution even before the prime minister.
The roles of Charron and Roger-Petit may be exaggerated (firstly by Charron and Roger-Petit themselves) but the fact such political mediocrities have integrated the presidential inner circle and could influence political decisions is already very telling and strongly reminiscent of the Ancien Régime monarchy when politics were partly decided by courtiers and royal mistresses.
Anyway, there is a lot of resentment against Macron among the ranks of Renew parliamentarians, unhappy about the unannounced and clearly unprepared dissolution and about the disconnection and authoritarianism of the president who has snubbed the parliament all along his tenure in office. In the case of a (likely) electoral defeat, the leadership of Macron (barred from running in 2027) over what remains of Renew will be strongly challenged by Philippe, Le Maire, Attal, Bayrou and maybe Darmanin (who is apparently uninterested into remaining interior minister after the legislative elections). More internal squabbling in sight.
This hasn’t been yet mentioned but the candidate fielded by the NFP in the Conflans-Sainte-Honorine constituency (on the PP quota) is Aurélien Rousseau, a former chief of staff for Élisabeth Borne and one of the architects of the pensions reform. Subsequently the health minister, Rousseau resigned from that office in December 2023 to protest the immigration bill. His defection is yet another sign of discontent with the leadership and political orientation taken by Macron.
As for the campaign itself, Macron has decided to double down on his Boomer anti-youth populism, promising a revaluation of pensions (when pensions are already constituting one of the largest government expenditure and as pensioners have been entirely spared by the pension reform which is only penalizing younger generations), even harsher penalties for unemployed workers (the third reform of unemployment insurance in four years), prohibition of cell phones for children under 11 and social networks for teenagers under 15 (good luck trying to implement these ones considering they can’t even regulated mainstream TV/radio channels), compulsory school uniform by 2026, the generalization and mandatory character of the expensive and useless ‘national universal service’ (a cheap civic service for youth that has already faced various scandals of harassment, racism and physical harm against its first volunteers) and the promise of ‘excellence for everybody at school’ when the education system has suffered from repeated budget cuts and chronic understaffing and has been disorganized by a series of hasty and ill-prepared reforms. As mentioned, the simplification of administrative procedures for change of gender self-identification, which was part of Macron’s 2022 platform, is now derided as an abomination because throwing under the bus minorities for short-term political gains is apparently the new cool in French politics.
That’s pretty much for the platform as the main strategy is to contrast the supposed budgetary seriousness and competence of the current government with the economic incompetence and inexperience of the RN and the unrealistic and arch-expansive platform of the NFP. A risky choice when the 2023 budget deficit has been estimated at 5.6% against the 4.9% initially predicted by Le Maire and when the debt of France has been downgraded by Standard & Poor’s at the beginning of the month. But, even more, the government can boasted about its economic successes as much as it wants, on the ground the average voter is still experiencing increases in the prices of basic necessities, the closure of public services, the deterioration of education and hospitals systems, the excessive delays to get an appointment with specialists and the unfortunate financial consequences of stricter roadworthiness tests and ill-conducted energy renovation programs for households.
