While President Emmanuel Macron is mired in his consultations to find a prime minister, his former prime minister Edouard Philippe is looking to seize the initiative. In an interview with the weekly magazine Le Point, published on Tuesday, September 3, the mayor of Le Havre confirmed that he is officially "a candidate in the next presidential election."
The statement was no surprise, as Philippe had made no secret of his ambitions since leaving the premiership in the summer of 2020. As far back as September 2021, he had declared his intention to run in the presidential election scheduled for 2027, saying he was "preparing myself to serve my country." The tempo, however, was unexpected, and it puts Macron under pressure, accentuating his image as a weakened president, who would now be forced to watch the future be written without him.
Without ever citing Macron by name, Philippe struck out against the sitting president, who seems incapable of resolving the political crisis he himself triggered. Recalling "all the ill" he thought of the decision to call early elections – at the end of June, he had criticized the president for having "killed the majority" – Philippe added a new element to his list of grievances: Macron's choice to dismiss Elisabeth Borne as prime minister on January 9, replacing her with Gabriel Attal, and therefore depriving himself of a political solution in the aftermath of the European elections. "I had recommended to the president of the Republic that he keep Elisabeth Borne," he confided. "That was not his decision."
Yet it was on the country's budgetary situation that the presidential contender was the most critical. "Nobody believes in it!" he stated, referring to the 2024-2027 stability program the French government presented to the European Union in April. "Our budgetary situation is one of the worst in Europe," continued Philippe, who has made the reduction of public debt into one of his political hallmarks.
By declaring his candidacy more than three years before the election, Philippe has fueled the accusations of "individualism" that his detractors have leveled at him. "While the current events, the urgency is to find stability (...), declaring his candidacy doesn't really seem appropriate to me today," lamented François Patriat, head of the Macron-aligned senators and one of the president's most loyal supporters, on the LCI news channel. "The providential man is rarely found three years before a presidential election, just as love at first sight is rarely foreseen three weeks before meeting someone," said a minister, speaking on the condition of anomity, adding the timing of this declaration was "absurd."
You have 55.17% of this article left to read. The rest is for subscribers only.