In July 2019, the former mayor of Le Havre Antoine Rufenacht published a column in Le Figaro to affirm that Edouard Philippe would make a very good mayor of Paris. The Prime Minister at the time is flabbergasted, his former mentor did not warn him, he will explain to him afterwards: “You would have told me not to do it!” Saturday, still in Le Figaro, “a very close friend of Emmanuel Macron” is cited as slipping his name for the post of Minister of National Education. The microcosm ignites immediately.
It’s no. Edouard Philippe does not want to return to government. He thinks he recognizes the author of the sentence: Richard Ferrand, who would find the idea good and not just mischievous. However, it is difficult not to detect some ulterior motives. It is at this moment that we must remember the lesson of things signed by the philosopher Jacques Chirac, used to remarking in a very small committee: “The most stupid is the guy who does not know how to manage an ambitious man.” Like his predecessors, Emmanuel Macron is not the last to use appointments to promote, dismiss, destabilize each other. He knows, for example, that if he were currently choosing a new Prime Minister, he would put a possible dolphin into orbit – he does not necessarily want to. If he persuaded his former head of government to return to the responsibilities, he would put down the strategy that he is building slowly but surely. Both know it.
Edouard Philippe could respond by putting forward another maxim from the same author: “It touches me one without moving the other.” Let no one come and tell him that he is slipping away, he is not situated on this terrain of male arguments. Education has become in his mind a question of such importance that it must be decided during a presidential election, confirmed during legislative elections. It was not in 2022 (except for the vocational school), so it must be in 2027, CQFD The next Minister of Education will not have a mandate to act, so he cannot be up to the challenge. The change of foot constituted by the replacement of Jean-Michel Blanquer by Pap Ndiaye a year ago rather confirms him in the idea that Emmanuel Macron is sailing on sight.
It’s not that the subject doesn’t interest him either, quite the contrary. Edouard Philippe will devote most of his book to it, in September, to ask questions that we are not necessarily ready to ask ourselves: on the small school, on the school rhythm, the day, the week or of the year, on the notion of excellence and its coexistence with school massification – he is convinced that everyone must become better, even… the good ones.
Edouard Philippe’s challenge
So it’s no. No (thank you) to join the cemetery of the elephants that this ministry shelters, from Lionel Jospin to François Fillon, from Jack Lang to François Bayrou via Jean-Pierre Chevènement: all in Education, some even in the post of number 2 of the government, but never managed to reach the top of the state.
Since 2020 and his departure from Matignon, the hypothesis of the return of Edouard Philippe has turned to Arles. Because he has always placed the Quai d’Orsay high in his pantheon of places of power, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs has often been mentioned for him, to the point that those close to him feared for a moment that he would put his sense of duty before personal interest. The proposal was never formally made to him.
Today, Edouard Philippe has a challenge: since the desire for alternation will hover over the next presidential election – which makes Laurent Wauquiez say that Rocard does not succeed Mitterrand, therefore that Philippe cannot succeed Macron – the mayor of Havre wants to embody a difference, of project as well as strategy or personality. He prefers to continue his marathon rather than branch off. And now ? Now he continues.