Will the government soon return to work? Emmanuel Macron will receive, on Monday, September 2, Bernard Cazeneuve, whose name is being persistently cited as a possible return to Matignon. Although the former socialist Prime Minister is now the favorite, nothing has been decided nearly two months later the legislative elections which resulted in a National Assembly without a majority. “Bernard Cazeneuve is not asking for it, but if he does it is out of duty and to avoid additional difficulties for the country,” his entourage explained on Sunday, September 1.
Emmanuel Macron is looking for a Prime Minister who will not be immediately censured in the National Assembly. It is by putting forward this reason that he rejected the nomination of Lucie Castets, presented by the parties of the New Popular Front (LFI-PS-Ecologistes-PCF), this left-wing alliance that came out on top in the last legislative elections. To maintain “institutional stability”, he could bet on the 61-year-old former minister, whose profile is less divisive for Macron’s party, particularly because of the strong opposition between Bernard Cazeneuve and La France Insoumise.
Minister of the Interior during the 2015 attacks, then Prime Minister in the last months of François Hollande’s five-year term, Bernard Cazeneuve had slammed the door on the PS in 2022, fiercely opposed to the alliance with LFI within the New Popular Ecological and Social Union (Nupes). This could earn him support from the central bloc while escaping censorship from the right and the far right. “He is one of those who “respond to the robot portrait”, greets the leader of the MoDem François Bayrou. A personality “capable of uniting beyond his camp”, notes the President of the National Assembly Yaël Braun-Pivet.
Socialists divided
But his arrival at Matignon could divide the socialist clan. On the one hand, the head of the PS, Olivier Faure, sees the nomination of Bernard Cazeneuve as a “trap set by the extreme right” to “divide” the left. While the head of the PS was firm in his support for Lucie Castets during the party’s summer university in Blois, his internal opponents are toying with the idea of Bernard Cazeneuve in power and insist on the need to continue the dialogue with the head of state.
The Cazeneuve hypothesis is “credible and serious”, hammered home the mayor of Paris Anne Hidalgo. The same tone of voice from the president of the group in the Senate, Patrick Kanner, who sees it as the possibility of a way out of the crisis from above. “Bernard Cazeneuve is a figure of the left, respected by the right”, he praises in the columns of the World. “He is a statesman, a free man and he is also a friend,” Nicolas Mayer-Rossignol, mayor of Rouen, adds to our colleagues. And what about François Hollande? The former president received this morning at 11 am should not dissuade Emmanuel Macron from appointing his ephemeral Prime Minister.
A return to the past?
Unsurprisingly, the France Insoumise clan is united against the arrival of the sixty-year-old at Matignon. His nomination “would cause damage in the parliamentary ranks of the PS”, predicted the rebellious leader Jean-Luc Mélenchon, while the other leaders of the movement promised that LFI would vote “a censure against Bernard Cazeneuve”. Manuel Bompard, national coordinator of LFI and deputy of Bouches-du-Rhône, added on Sunday: “Bernard Cazeneuve is not supported by any of the four left-wing parties in the country.”
Bernard Cazeneuve’s government experience, acquired under François Hollande, also serves as an angle of attack for his opponents, who depict his possible arrival as a return to the past. Bernard Cazeneuve “wears, perhaps somewhat unfairly, the tunic of a dying Hollandism”, thus slipped the former president, Nicolas Sarkozy, who will also be received at the Elysée this Monday morning. “There will be no censorship in principle” of a Cazeneuve government, promises the National Rally, while the far-right party had assured, like the right and the Macronists, that it would censor a government including rebels, or implementing the NFP program. However, Sébastien Chenu, vice-president of the RN and deputy of the north, does not hide his lack of enthusiasm: “Bernard Cazeneuve represents nothing”.
It remains to be seen what the main person concerned thinks about it. Will Bernard Cazeneuve take the risk of being considered Emmanuel Macron’s man as he enters the last third of his presidency? In the former minister’s entourage, it is believed that the latter would only accept Matignon if he considers that he has enough freedom and as a man “of the left”. He is not “demanding” but he is ready to serve his country, it was stressed.