“The absent are always wrong”. Emmanuel Macron meets, this Friday morning, with the party leaders who responded to the second “Saint-Denis meetings” with the firm intention of showing the oppositions who declined the invitation that they missed the boat.
As on August 30, during the first edition, this very Macronist exercise intended to “create consensus” in a fractured country will be held at the House of Education of the Legion of Honor, a stone’s throw from the basilica where rest the kings of France, at the gates of Paris. On the agenda: the situation in Gaza and Ukraine, the extension of the referendum to social issues, decentralization and possible constitutional reforms on the status of Corsica and New Caledonia.
All the party leaders had traveled for the first edition, as well as for a meeting at the Elysée after the Hamas attack on Israel. But this time, Eric Ciotti (Les Républicains), Olivier Faure (Socialist Party) and Manuel Bompard (La France Insoumise) opted for the empty chair policy.
The Republicans will nevertheless be represented by the President of the Senate, Gérard Larcher, invited in the same capacity as the President of the Assembly, Yaël Braun-Pivet. On the opposition side, only Marine Tondelier (Europe Ecologie Les Verts), Fabien Roussel (French Communist Party), Jordan Bardella (National Rally), Hervé Marseille (Union of Democrats and Independents) and Guillaume Lacroix (Radical Left Party) agreed to honor the presidential appointment. The Head of State will also be able to count on his allies, Stéphane Séjourné (Renaissance), François Bayrou (MoDem), Edouard Philippe (Horizons), Laurent Hénart (Radical Party).
An “obsession with palaver with no future”
At Les Républicains, the party boss, Eric Ciotti, accused Emmanuel Macron of fueling the democratic crisis. After having “granted the benefit of the doubt” during the first meetings, Eric Ciotti now refuses to be “the guarantor of a new sequence of narration which will achieve nothing”, criticizing an “obsession with palaver without a future”.
“By multiplying initiatives outside the institutional field, you are helping to weaken them and fuel the crisis of democracy,” he said in an open letter of which AFP obtained a copy. The discussion “must be public, either in Parliament, where the people delegate their representatives, or directly with the people themselves by referendum”, he insists.
“You are the President of the French Republic and you must respect its institutions”, writes the deputy for Alpes-Maritimes, whose absence in Saint-Denis was decried by the Head of State as “a political fault” .
On the left, the First Secretary of the PS Olivier Faure denounces “a staging”, while at LFI we speak of “a monarchical exercise” aimed at bypassing Parliament. Negative judgments on the exercise also made by 61% of French people, according to an Odoxa survey for Le Figaro.
“Endless exercises”
The new meeting in Saint-Denis must show that the demands of the political parties have “been heard” and “that action has been taken on them”, indicates government spokesperson Olivier Véran.
The first meeting led to a social conference on low wages and a debate in Parliament on the international situation. Too little, deplored Thursday Jordan Bardella in a letter addressed to Emmanuel Macron, affirming that “these endless exercises mask presidential inertia less and less”.
With those who will be present on Friday, “we can agree on the fact that democracy is worn out, contested” and on the means to “repair the link” with the French, assures Renaissance spokesperson Loïc Signor.