It’s a story as old as the world, and as old as politics. For a man of power, the successor, whoever he is and even more if he is from the same camp, is an assassin, the one who has the face of the end of his own adventure. And of this successor, one thing is always required: to prolong the work accomplished in order to consolidate it and establish it over time. “I want there to be a sequel to what we have started,” said Emmanuel Macron, interviewed on Tuesday during a walkabout in New Caledonia. As the man who challenges him evokes Edouard Philippe, the president continues: “He did well by my side”, and even adds: “He is a friend.”
If it’s a friend, then all is well… Because the problem that arises for the successor is quite different: he must incarnate, in one way or another, the rupture if he wants to have a chance of winning. And Edouard Philippe knows it, who thinks more of 1958-type rockers, neither more nor less, than “change in continuity” in the Giscard fashion in 1974.
Telescoping summarizes well the squaring of the circle of Edouard Philippe. He cannot deny what he has done, he does not want to, and he needs the voters who made the Macron saga possible. Reconciling white and black, therefore, without making gray. Consequently, not big red that stains, but subtle.
Terminal visiting… in Le Havre
The wink is these three photos posted on Instagram and Twitter during Brigitte Macron’s surprise visit to Le Havre on July 18. The image, and the sound, with the words of the day in the mouth of the president. The background, where he will have plenty of time to stand out, is for the start of the school year. Edouard Philippe is not ahead of his time: he hasn’t finished putting the finishing touches to the book he will be releasing in mid-September, an essay on education sprinkled with narrative elements. Writing as a way to force himself to fix his ideas, he always found the exercise healthy.
Tomorrow cannot look like today. And today’s name is Elisabeth Borne. This Tuesday, accompanied by a flanked by ministers, she was in Le Havre. In the mayor’s office, she may have learned that it was Anne Lauvergeon, then president of Areva, who had explained to Edouard Philippe, then director of public affairs at Areva, that a certain François Mitterrand had once done what now does to him: his famous map of France with a thousand pins or so – in green, the places where Edouard Philippe lived, in red those he visited as Prime Minister, in white, as an author, in blue as the patron of his movement, Horizons. Seeing the statue of a boxer offered to the Norman mayor by someone who had the curious idea of being first president and then Prime Minister, the Russian Dmitri Medvedev, Elisabeth Borne will also have been able to see the absolute determination of Edouard Philippe to get into the ring in 2027.
When a Prime Minister of Emmanuel Macron meets a (ex) Prime Minister of Emmanuel Macron, guess what they tell each other… At least one thing is certain: the presidential ears must have been whistling, fortunately the great leader is on the other side of the planet. Because Edouard Philippe and Elisabeth Borne share the same sense of humor which does not refuse to be vachard. However, both know better than the whole world – and on an equal footing with Jean Castex alone – what it means to work with the president on a daily basis; worse, to be the head of his government. Impossible job, as Emmanuel Macron is used to asking the first of his ministers to attract the light but above all not to overshadow him, to stay the course but above all to conceal that he changes his mind at a sometimes frantic pace. To stay in his place, when the story of number 2 who wants to become number 1, caliph instead of the caliph, is also as old as the world.