Gathered that evening, in a Parisian apartment, the friends of Edouard Philippe, guests accustomed to meeting each other, once a year, beer in hand. In this unstable political world, their reunion is like a ritual, on a date that rarely varies: November 28, the host’s birthday. Too bad if this year, the 28th falls on a Tuesday. Who says you have to wait until Friday to celebrate your birthday? Perhaps the neighbors who in a Haussmann building have little chance of escaping the noise produced by fifty pairs of feet treading the floor, but we have the right, from time to time, to “put on the bolobo”, like the other would say. No question of reserving the bamboche for round numbers. 53 years old is the age of Milan Kundera – one of the birthday boy’s favorite authors – when he finished writing The Unbearable Lightness of Being, his masterpiece. The age of all possibilities, in short. Places that say, the book with the funny title by the former Prime Minister, published a month before his 53rd birthday, won over 18,000 readers. Gave rise to a literary tour. Revealed an intimate part of his life. Without dispelling anything of the mystery that surrounds its strategy.
No matter how impatient they are, the guests know that questioning him or – worse – pressing him would only encourage him to back down. It is also pointless to count on the speech given between two unwrapped gifts. No speeches, no big unpacking. Suddenly, understanding that the presents will remain piled up and packaged until their departure, a participant worries: “Will Edouard know that my gift is my gift…?”
Whether they know him from the ENA, like Benoît Ribadeau-Dumas, from the Council of State like Frédéric Mion and Marc Guillaume, or from the UMP, like Pierre-Yves Bournazel, here they are all moved into docile, constrained guests to spy on him and himself to hope to glean clues about his will. This assembly says a lot about him, and what he will do tomorrow. The same goes for the composition of the drinks, remember those who, in November 2016, dipped their lips in glasses that were fuller than usual. The day before the festivities, Alain Juppé, the mentor and long-imagined winner, failed in the primary. “We had to charge the Corona,” admits one of the revelers. For the 2023 edition: no drama or hindrance. Edouard Philippe is free, freer than ever, relieved of Matignon and determined to look at the horizon(s) with the calm that characterizes him.
When it’s time to enjoy their share of homemade quiche, those who attend each fall observe Guillaume Gallienne shaking the hand of a new arrival. Does the actor know that Laurent Marcangeli is called Laurent Marcangeli and has the heavy task of chairing the Horizons group in the National Assembly? Surprise, here is Gérald Darmanin, recently released by the Assembly’s Law Committee before which he presented his immigration bill. Finally, something to gossip about! Between Edouard Philippe and him, relations are… “stable!”, their accomplice Thierry Solère hastens to assure a curious person observing them from the other side of the room. But regularly eventful, divergent ambitions oblige. “[Edouard] Does he want it?” dared, a few weeks earlier, the Minister of the Interior in The Parisian. He is certainly not the one who would say, like Laurent Fabius: “The desire is for chocolate.” Darmanin, for a long time in the Sarkozian school of virile conquest, retains faith in the method. To want is to can. But 2027 is three and a half years away, it’s too early to tear ourselves apart. So, let’s toast!
Fortunately, the cheerful sidekick, Gilles Boyer, is being held elsewhere today. He would no doubt have found it difficult not to joke that “Gérald, Sébastien [Lecornu] and Thierry dissuaded elected officials from joining Horizons, and did so with professionalism, determination, zeal, because everything they do, they do it thoroughly.” How we would have laughed!
For the moment, in this Parisian salon, it is the dismay that seizes the tenant of Beauvau when he hears the CEO Alexandre Bompard recount the consequences of the calls for a boycott launched against Carrefour since the company owning franchised stores in Israel announced that it would provide food rations to Israeli soldiers. “You can do geopolitics just by looking at which country the boycott is in effect,” the business leader concludes in substance.
But the time has come to turn up the volume on the Bluetooth speaker to better enjoy Dire Straits hits. Laughing and relaxed, Edouard Philippe beats time with his hand. One more moment, Mr. Executioner.
.