Back to basics. After having started his campaign with right-wing markers (retirement at 65, conditioning of the RSA), then multiplied the calls from the foot to the left, by promoting the social measures of his project (payment of social assistance at source), Emmanuel Macron has returned to what is considered his « ADN”: his pro-European commitment.
Tuesday April 5, five days before the first round of the presidential election, the candidate president made the choice to go to the small village of Spézet, in Finistère – in the stronghold of one of his early faithful. , the President of the National Assembly, Richard Ferrand – where he delivered a real plea for Europe. A space, which “remove nothing from the strength of France” most “make it” on the contrary ” stronger “, he assured, in a pugnacious tone, introducing himself as “passionately French and resolutely European”.
Standing, microphone in hand, in the center of the village square, and surrounded by nearly 500 people, he held a kind of meeting in the open air, in a countryside atmosphere. Copiously booed by a handful of “yellow vests” when he arrived – who were then kept at a distance by security – the head of state was then cheered by the majority of the crowd present. “Macron president! » “And one and two, and five more years!” », you could hear, between two bagpipe notes.
“Closing up is madness”
In a meticulous way, the tenant of the Elysée has exposed all the areas in which France benefits from the alliance it forms with its neighbors. “The solution for our energy independence”, affected by the war in Ukraine? She “is European and cannot be French”, he decided. “It is thanks to and through Europe that we will build a strategy to buy gas and oil elsewhere than in Russia. » The management of migratory flows? Again and again Europe, with the protection of the external borders of the Schengen area and the establishment of a common reception policy.
Ditto for the construction of a real defense policy, which he only envisages on a continental scale. “It is through Europe that, in the new geopolitics, France will be able to be neither the vassal of China nor [celui] the United States ! », he launched to applause, considering in passing that the Old Continent “allows us to reform a capitalism that has become excessive and sometimes crazy”. “The France of equal opportunities, power and economic independence can only be achieved if our France is stronger in Europe”, he summed up in an ode to “this little piece of land”, where we have “invented humanism, human rights and the spirit of enlightenment”.
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