The moment will remain as one of the most surreal sequences of the five-year term. On Wednesday, in front of members of the government who were as worried as they were mute, Gérald Darmanin presented his communication on “preparing for the forest fire season”. The Minister of the Interior was not the last to measure the comical side of the moment. Yes, there is a fire. The house is burning, the Macronist house, and they are not looking elsewhere.
There, before their eyes, two men can no longer stand each other. It’s annoying, one is President of the Republic, the other is Prime Minister. “It’s physical: you can see when words become very hollow that their relationship is very degraded, even execrable,” says a present. To get to the bottom of it, a minister even sounded out Gabriel Attal’s first collaborator. Why then has the bond with Emmanuel Macron become so strained? A quick response: “It’s normal, when you’re run over with a bus, you don’t say thank you.” But sensitive souls can rest assured: between the two heads of the executive, the story was already over. Over before it even began. “It lasted a week. As soon as Attal’s general policy speech, Macron considered that it wasn’t up to par,” reports a malicious tongue. Correction of another: “From the day he named him, he began to hate him. Too young, too popular, too cocky.”
So on Wednesday, Gérald Darmanin spoke. Two days earlier, he was not talkative, having been put in a runoff the day before in the first round in his constituency in the North. This is not a council of ministers: if Emmanuel Macron has gathered the members of the government, it is not really to ask their advice, that is not the style of the house. Just pretending. Very quickly, the Minister of the Interior indicates that he does not want to speak. A little later, the Minister responsible for Business and Tourism, Olivia Grégoire, signals to him to intervene, he remains silent. “It did not go so badly”, insists the president. If he says so… Emmanuel Macron may be keeping score, he is mainly settling them. “I can already hear those who want to divide the majority”: here he is targeting Edouard Philippe, who declared that the president had “killed the presidential majority”. One bullet? Two bullets. “Far too many members of the majority are thinking about 2027. They won’t be there. Any form of disunity is a form of erasure”: the head of state is spreading the word.
The former Prime Minister is not around the table, it is one of his close associates, Christophe Béchu, who therefore takes his defense. “I hear what you say, assures the Minister of Ecological Transition. But there are positions that I cannot assume, I cannot not hold a clear discourse vis-à-vis LFI.”
Bruno Le Maire counts the hours
This is the subject that lit the fuse. Mentioned on Monday, discussed on Wednesday, but talking about it does not change minds. On Wednesday, the president tried to straighten out the Macronist position a little, which the contortions of the last few hours have made, if not illegible, at least unacceptable for some: withdrawals today, yes, a government alliance tomorrow, no. “That’s good, we support left-wing people in right-wing constituencies who get elected by right-wing people to lead left-wing policies,” chuckled one participant.
When he returns to his ministry after the council of ministers, Bruno Le Maire prefers to laugh about it, for fear of crying: “I understood that we were for LFI at the time of the vote, but against at the time of the coalition.” In reality, he is up in arms. “The French understand that we do all this by calculation. We provide the extremes with the answer by the extremes. It is a political error that will be paid for at the ballot box. We call for a vote for a party that says that a dead policeman is one less RN voter?”
At Bercy, the boxes are already open on all floors. Leave, quickly, as soon as possible. The cabinet has looked at legal ways to avoid things dragging on. Especially if Jordan Bardella does not go to Matignon and we have to try to put together a government of bits and pieces with the left. Horresco references“the first price to pay will be a tax increase”. Bruno Le Maire, seven years, one month and seventeen days in Finance, a record since Giscard, is now counting the hours: “The sooner I leave, the better off I am.” He has just received a text message from the president of Medef, Patrick Martin, who is outraged to see the government start to undo what it had done, the reform of unemployment insurance.
Macron cursed by his own people
A week ago, at the Council of Ministers, Emmanuel Macron still thought he was Johnny, or Sarkozy, the two have the same repertoire. “What matters most is desire.” His remarks infuriated some of those present, not completely convinced that those who will die on the battlefield owe it to their lack of “desire.” How many of them are there today in the future ex-presidential majority who curse the head of state? Or rather, to go faster, how many of them do not curse him? Yaël Braun-Pivet, who fought to try to reverse the course of history and avoid dissolution, warned: “Those who will be re-elected will be survivors of Macronism. If a coalition succeeds in being formed, the president will be in Defense and Foreign Affairs, and he will stay there.”
Emmanuel Macron on a shelf, or in the trash? Yesterday’s Macronists no longer know what to do with Macron tomorrow. “He reminds me of Tony Blair,” says one of the most eminent ministers. “He was the star of Europe and he lost everything on the war in Iraq. I’m afraid that the president has lost everything in the eyes of history with the dissolution.”
Emmanuel Macron and magical thinking, the end. “He was convinced, he told me, that in his gesture, the French would see ‘the audacity and courage of a president who is decidedly not like the others'”, says a leading member of the majority. And in the end… “The guarantor of national unity has failed in his essential dimension, we have never been so divided, we can no longer even talk to each other”, notes a minister. On Sunday evening, will each side succeed in turning the page without tearing it up completely?
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