Interviews with Nicolas Sarkozy should in the future be carried out with ChatGPT, this artificial intelligence capable of holding a conversation. At each public intervention, the former president renews his call for a government agreement between the right and Emmanuel Macron. With the same words and arguments. “We must take an initiative where no one will lose their soul and where everyone will win in the eyes of the French because they will have made the choice of the national interest”, he launches this Friday at the Figaroafter being sentenced to one year in prison for corruption.
The former head of state worries with the daily about the “sterile opposition” of the Republicans, an obstacle to their reconstruction. “By placing themselves in systematic opposition, they run the risk of being inaudible, wedged between Le Pen and Mélenchon”, he noted this fall in the JDD. Withdrawn from active political life since 2016, Nicolas Sarkozy likes to play the old sage in overhang. Emmanuel Macron must “reach out” and LR cannot remain on his “as for himself”, he slips to the Figaro. “You need a power that reaches out, and you need people in the opposition who take it,” summed up the former president in December. in front of the Crif.
“I am not a macronist”
His reasoning does not lack logic. An agreement would give Emmanuel Macron an absolute majority in the Assembly and allow the right to enter government. “You don’t have an incarnation. You should have gone to government for two years, asked for ten reforms, even leaving afterwards,” he told a friend this summer. Exercise power, before staging a break with a ending macronism: hadn’t Nicolas Sarkozy succeeded in this maneuver with Jacques Chirac? The ex-head of state recently summed up his thoughts with an LR executive: “I am not a macronist. We must take power at home, because he is weak.”
Nicolas Sarkozy repeats himself. But who still listens to it? On the right, more people. Because this strategy has a flaw: its strategist. The founder of LR pays for his behavior during the last presidential election. He let Valérie Pécresse drown and hastened to support Emmanuel Macron the day after the first round. On this occasion, he already invited his family to respond to the president’s “call for a rally”. Ideal for blurring the message of LR during the legislative elections. Nicolas Sarkozy acted too soon. He is suspected of watching more for his personal influence than for the interests of his political family. “It’s a bad transmitter”, notes an LR hierarch rather favorable to a government pact.
Time, opponent of Nicolas Sarkozy
The Sarkozy star has faded. Above all, the right is deaf to his arguments. Among the 62 LR deputies, only a handful plead for a rapprochement with Macronie. The others, who survived the 2017 and 2022 elections, consider themselves opponents of the head of state. “At Matignon, you would not take more than ten deputies”, confided the boss of the LR deputies Olivier Marleix to Nicolas Sarkozy during a recent interview.
The president of LR Éric Ciotti has beefed up his speech against the executive after having dubbed his pension reform. Time is Nicolas Sarkozy’s adversary. The closer the end of Emmanuel Macron’s mandate approaches, the less the right will want an alliance. “There is a law of gravity in politics, noted Olivier Marleix in March. The President of the Republic is a powerful star that exerts significant gravity at the start of his term. But at the end, his gravitational force is close to zero .” Laurent Wauquiez, putative candidate for 2027, judges that the right must stay away from macronism to embody an alternative in four years.
Nicolas Sarkozy did not succeed in his mission as a matchmaker. On the right, he is losing influence. Emmanuel Macron, with whom he has good relations, has never reached out to the Republicans. His repeated pleas for an alliance are promised polite indifference. A political twist in the spring of 2022, its proximity to Macronie is now raising eyebrows on the right. The Republicans are taking a different path than that outlined by their former leader. The trajectories separate, Nicolas Sarkozy is a simple commentator.