It’s a safe bet that 2022 will not be 2017. Four years ago, entering the second round of the presidential election against Marine Le Pen was worth a winning ticket for the Élysée. For the coming year, the question arises in other words: who is more likely to beat Marine Le Pen?
To make matters better, last December, confiding in the online newspaper Brut, Emmanuel Macron confesses: ” Maybe I couldn’t be a candidate. This is what opens up many appetites. That of Xavier Bertrand, for example who, by deciding not to go through the box of the primaries, is sowing quite a lot of disorder within the Republicans.
But this is nothing, compared to that aroused by Édouard Philippe, both former UMP and Matignon under Macron; not only in the ranks of LR, but also in those of LREM, a movement to which he never joined. Will this younger Alain Juppé dare to cross the Rubicon? Here is all the question.
The title of the essay he has just co-signed with Gilles Boyer, another disciple of the same Juppé, is therefore more than ambiguous: Clear prints and lines. Asked by Point why 1is April, great is the impression of a speech not quite clear: ” I did not give up political life, otherwise I would not have run in Le Havre. I am the mayor of a city that I love, I continue to meet people, read, reflect, learn, and I have no intention of seeing my beliefs or my ideas go to waste without me. fight for them. “It would be really necessary to have a devious mind not to deduce from it that all this looks very much like a preparation aiming to run for the supreme office …
Especially when he adds: ” You cannot conceive of a candidacy to stand in the way of 30, 40 or 48% of the population. To present yourself, you have to propose a plan for the nation, a collective and ambitious and credible path.. His, for example? It is true that Emmanuel Macron, entangled in the management of the pandemic, hardly has the leisure and time to devote himself to such a “plan”.
Suddenly, the signals sent by the former Prime Minister begin to agitate the political landernau. On the right, first of all, since opposing Xavier Bertrand’s projects and confining those of Gérard Larcher, President of the Senate insisting on wanting to organize, according to modalities that he himself struggles to define, possible primaries of the right. Among the macronists then, one of them confiding in Europe 1 : « The assurance that he won’t do anything against Macron, we don’t have it. »
Invited this Sunday April 4 on France 2 by Laurent Delahousse, would Édouard Philippe have started to lift the mortgage of a possible participation in the next presidential term? It is to be believed. Especially when this journalist quotes this sentence which would be attributed to him: ” In any case, I will not be a candidate, unless perhaps Emmanuel Macron was not. And here we are again. Embarrassed response from the mayor of Le Havre: “Uh, I think I often read this kind of sentences. I do not express myself on the subject. “And Laurent Delahousse to insist:” So it is not from you, this sentence ? »
And there, like another Edward, this one Balladur, swearing to his great gods that he would never come forward against Jacques Chirac, Philippe stammered: ” I don’t think I said it. I don’t believe no, anyway, I don’t believe I said it publicly. Anyway, here it is now made public. Would such audacity have been made possible by the good polls of this potential candidate; 53% of favorable opinions, is it not nothing? Response from the interested party: ” Popularity is as solid as a wisp of smoke. »
Looking back, his mentor Alain Juppé, favorite in the polls, but humiliated in the right-wing primaries, could not have said better.
