Former Prime Minister Alain Juppé spent an entire year in Quebec. Sentenced in the case of the fictitious jobs of the City of Paris, in January 2004, he had found in this temporary exile material to recharge his batteries and to watch, from afar, the “collective depression” which he then saw France affected.
Edouard Philippe, who was treading Quebec soil for the first time in his life, does not intend to linger. In any case, not immediately. “I am still in the French political game”he explained to political science students at Laval University in Quebec, in front of whom he held a conference on Wednesday, September 7. “If, by extraordinary, in a few years I came out of it, I always dreamed of being a teacher abroad, I throw it like that”, he said, looking at the rector of the university, without seeming to believe too much in this hypothesis himself. While Emmanuel Macron launched, this Thursday, the National Council for Refoundation, in Marcoussis (Essonne), Edouard Philippe, excused for travel, is represented there by the mayor (Horizons) of Albi, Stéphanie Guiraud-Chaumeil.
After having met for forty-eight hours, with his cap as mayor of Le Havre (Seine-Maritime), his counterparts from Montreal then from Quebec and having visited the ports of these two cities located on the Saint-Laurent – “Port development is an essential industrial and commercial subject”he hammered – it was indeed as former Prime Minister of Emmanuel Macron and political leader of the new Horizons party that he was invited to speak on “the art of governing at a time of great vertigo”.
In this faculty which has seen some of the greatest political leaders in Quebec, including former Prime Minister Jean Lesage (1960-1966), the father of the “quiet revolution”, which brought Quebec into modernity , Edouard Philippe denied being a “philosopher or power theorist”.
“I’m not sure I’m an example, I was wrong”, he confided at the outset. He willingly shared some “dizziness” personal. Vertigo when he understands, in 2017, that he will be appointed Prime Minister: “I was seized with panic fear and lost 6 kilos in ten days, it’s a vertigo that one feels when faced with the idea that one has of oneself. Am I going to meat myself? »
Sometimes physical vertigo, once settled in Matignon, faced with the decisions to be made and their possible consequences. “During the fire at Notre-Dame Cathedralhe told the hundred students and teachers gathered, it was the president who took the decision to send the firefighters to the fire, when the building threatened to collapse, but the next day, passing in front of the Invalides courtyard, I had a vision, that coffins that might have been there. I was seized with tremors. »
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