The affair left its mark at the top of the State. Worse than traces, regrets and remorse. Emmanuel Macron likes to say in private: “We do not put ourselves in the hands of our adversaries.” During the pension reform, he did exactly the opposite. And when we see the result – the government escaped censure by 9 votes – we realize that the maneuver did not exactly go as planned. Confidence of someone very close to the president: “If there had been an agreement with the right, and an agreement respected, it would have cost us less. I even asked myself the question afterwards: if we had raised the age of legal departure at 65 and not 64, would that have changed anything in the way the sequence unfolded?” To put it another way: the executive wanted to curry favor with LR, paid the price and got nothing in return.
We won’t take them again… This Wednesday, September 27, the government wants to have the public finance programming law adopted without firing a shot. Bruno Le Maire discussed with all the groups to find that the Republicans were incapable of agreeing and committing. Elisabeth Borne hoped that the right would look away at the time of the election, it will ultimately be a division between votes for, against and abstentions. The most responsible in history, oh horror, is called Jean-Philippe Tanguy, RN deputy for the Somme, whom the Minister of the Economy received. And as there will be a definitive reading of the text in November, as the right is definitely not reliable and as we should not put ourselves in the hands of the RN, go for 49.3. Better alone than in a bad comapny…
The microcosm continues to wonder about a possible agreement between Macronie and the right, but there is something broken between the two. “In light of the past year, we can wonder what impact it has to increase discussions with Les Républicains,” notes Elisabeth Borne privately. The new president of the Renaissance group in the Assembly, Sylvain Maillard, thinks the same, who evokes “an apprenticeship”: “We learned that we could not count on LR. We even paid to see. The exchanges with the Republicans do not lead to a vote. What Olivier Marleix says [président du groupe LR]I’m not sure he will then apply it.”
Less diplomatic, a leader of the majority speaks of the LR elected officials in these more colorful terms: “If they can turn it upside down on us, they will.” Confidence is really far away and it is a fact that matters at a time when the government is looking for a majority for its next big emblematic text, that on immigration. What’s the point of reaching out? “The problem with this Assembly,” points out a heated minister, “is that you pay two or three times for the same cookie because you have several sellers.” Translation: with the diversity of interlocutors, notably LR, a race for concessions is developing. An overbidding that costs without bringing anything back. A lesson not to be forgotten.