2023-07-20 10:45:07
A redesign, what redesign? Since the beginning of the week, the Elysée has been working to minimize the scope of what is usually one of the weapons available to the executive to strike public opinion and relaunch government action. At the end of the period of “hundred days” that the Head of State had himself set to extricate himself from the pension conflict, Elisabeth Borne remains Prime Minister. Confirmed without having succeeded in enlarging the majority, she will soon be at the head of a new government. Double hit.
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However, the Elysée is doing everything to play down the event: the maintenance of the Prime Minister was ratified on Monday July 17 with lip service, in the name of “the necessary stability of the substantive work” and without any laudatory appreciation. The same trivialization is displayed with regard to the development of the Borne III government, the composition of which was to be revealed by a simple press release on Thursday, July 20.
Those close to Emmanuel Macron qualify this reshuffle as “simple adjustment”, where the Prime Minister sees it, on the contrary, as a guarantee of consolidation and is campaigning for significant changes. The moment is therefore not so trivial as that, even if everything is done to make people believe the opposite.
Since the start of the second five-year term, the treatment inflicted on Elisabeth Borne has been both brutal and unfair: the prime minister has evolved from fixed-term contract to fixed-term contract, under the lazzi of many close to the head of state, who have recently recalled her inability to pass the pension reform without resorting to 49.3 or castigated her too technocratic profile. The elected Calvados was, it is true, not the first choice of Emmanuel Macron, who had first set his sights on the former member of the Les Républicains (LR) party Catherine Vautrin, before giving up appointing her under pressure from the presidential majority, worried about a right-wing of the last five-year term.
Emmanuel Macron hindered
Periodically threatened to be replaced by more political or more empathetic than her, Elisabeth Borne nevertheless managed to survive for lack of an obvious solution. She showed undeniable know-how in the art of negotiating majorities text by text and, faced with the offensive of ministers from the right who, like Gérald Darmanin, claimed to succeed her, she was able to build effective alliances within Renaissance.
Also read the portrait: Article reserved for our subscribers “They don’t step on my toes like that! “: Elisabeth Borne, the resilient of Matignon
Its maintenance in Matignon, however, symbolizes the failure of enlargement on the left as on the right, and therefore the perpetuation of a perilous political situation. Emmanuel Macron still remains as hampered as he approaches the last useful part of his last five-year term, that which leads him to the European elections of June 2024: on the budget, as on immigration, his government is at the mercy of a motion of censure if the increasingly radicalized LR deputies decide to vote for it.
However, placing the responsibility for this fragility on Elisabeth Borne would be unfair and counterproductive. Wanting to trivialize the reappointment of the Prime Minister pending a new presidential roadmap which will not be unveiled until the end of the summer, the Elysée takes the risk of writing off the achievements of the Prime Minister, which are also those of the Head of State. Despite an eruptive political climate, important texts, such as the military programming law or the law on justice, were adopted during the hundred days. As for the rest, that is to say the definition of a clear course for the last part of the mandate, it is the exclusive responsibility of the President of the Republic.
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