A slap. The first hours following the announcement by the President of the Republic, Gabriel Attal is petrified. Around him, Matignon is frozen in anger, stunned moments, during which his handful of loyalists realize that thus end six years of conquest. Nothing can temper their rage, not even Alexis Kohler’s eagerness to come and console them. The wavering is brief. “Nothing is so close to favor as disgrace” wrote the Marquise de Maintenon to the first president of the Parliament of Paris in 1696. If disgrace is a cousin of favor, is it not that favor is also a cousin of disgrace? That it would then be possible – having suffered the resounding disgrace of an imposed, secret, thought-out dissolution – to seek other favors, those that a suddenly wide-open future could offer?
Immediately, the Prime Minister, thirty years old, plastic, viscerally political, understands that he must, that he can, transform mud into gold, disgrace into favor. Not to complain, not to moan, to grasp that the future is being played out in these ruins, there, now, freed from a deadly guardianship that has become detestable. Emmanuel Macron did not think it necessary to discuss with him his choice to dissolve the Assembly, much less to consider the campaign together, he hid everything from him, preferring to open up about it, two months ago already, to his father, a retired doctor from Amiens, to whom we know he is not very close, how can we do more harm than by confiding in our father what we deliberately hide from the one we pretended to believe was once a “little brother”?
No matter, he is campaigning, with a clenched jaw, dark circles under his eyes and clear words. “He is running a crazy campaign, with his nose to the grindstone, working like crazy,” admires his entourage, puffing himself up a few hours before the second round of the legislative elections: “We did everything not to give them the keys to the truck.” “Them”, meaning the RN and the possibility of seeing Jordan Bardella succeed their champion. The trick is clever. Where Emmanuel Macron opens the door to the RN by calling on the French to vote again after the European elections, he is struggling to narrow the door for them – or even slam it…
And it suits him that his advisors suggest that the dissolution was not the game of Go of a cornered president, but that it came from the deleterious spell cast by Gérald Darmanin, “a brigand” who turned the heads, usually cold, of the president and Alexis Kohler. Attributing to this future presidential candidate, to this rival from the right, the responsibility for the disorder cannot hurt. “Everything will depend on the way Gabriel leaves Matignon”, says an Elysée advisor. How will he leave? “Without having given the keys to the truck” then. Monday, July 8, the day after a second round that draws an assembly that is difficult to govern, he will present his resignation, and plans to stay “as long as duty requires” in the context of the Olympic Games. Duty, and not the President of the Republic, who orders him to stay. The “little brother” is no more.