“Everything is going very well”: Élisabeth Borne assured Thursday that she had “a very fluid relationship” with Emmanuel Macron, after several days of hesitation in the executive couple around the response to be made to the National Rally. “What matters to me is that we act to meet the priorities of the French,” explained the head of government on the sidelines of a trip to Mayenne, believing that “the rest is a storm in a glass of water”.
A statement on the RN behind this apparent feud
On Wednesday, Emmanuel Macron had taken the trouble to restate all his “confidence” in the tenant of Matignon, after having yet seemed to reframe it the day before about how to counter the National Rally (RN). At the origin of this apparent quarrel, an interview given Sunday by Elisabeth Borne to Radio J, during which she had estimated that the party of Marine Le Pen was an “heir of Pétain” carrying a “dangerous ideology” and whose ideas should not be “trivialized”.
During the Council of Ministers, two days later, Emmanuel Macron had called not to fight the far right “by moral arguments” but by “the substance” and “the concrete”, according to several participants. These reported presidential remarks had been strongly criticized by the other oppositions.
Speculations about a possible change of Prime Minister
If he assured that he was not in the habit of reframing his Prime Minister in public or even in the Council of Ministers, Emmanuel Macron had nevertheless assumed a position distinct from that of Elisabeth Borne, Wednesday, during a press conference in Bratislava, on the sidelines of a trip to Slovakia.
He had thus estimated that one could “no longer beat” the far right “simply with historical and moral arguments” (the term “historic” referring directly to the reference to Philippe Pétain, the French head of state who collaborated with Nazi Germany). This new episode had revived speculation as to a possible change of head of government.