He spent more time in front of the cameras on the phones held up in front of him than on stage, talking into a microphone.
After a first public intervention noticed and commented, last week, Édouard Philippe lowered the pressure on Wednesday evening.
In Neubourg, a rural town in the Eure region, the former prime minister, campaigning to support Sébastien Lecornu in the senatorial elections, made sure to temper his speech.
No longer a question of predicting
"storms"
, but of calling, once again, to the gathering.
“I'm not going to talk to you about national politics, and that's how it is.
(…) When I was Prime Minister, I liked little the commentators, or more exactly I liked little the political leaders who during their interventions were limited to commenting on political life.
And so, I do not want to comment on national political life
, ”he insisted, anxious not to be perceived as the scratching hair of the new government team.
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In a speech of barely twenty minutes, the mayor of Le Havre, who knows he is being listened to, was therefore content to promote the overcoming of political divisions, and to recall the spirit of 2017,
"a very special moment of The political life".
Back to boots of linen and facing some 200 local elected officials, the former head of government chose to tell the conditions of his appointment.
At the time,
“the president made the choice not only to hold the speech of the necessary openness and the necessary gathering, the speech in the form of overcoming partisan attitudes so that people who think they can work together can do so effectively. , but beyond these words, he chose to propose to a man who had not done his campaign, who was not from his political formation, to take the plunge and ask himself if there was really, in the proposals he made, things he fundamentally disagreed with and things he wanted to move on.
It is not a proposal formulated lightly, it is not a proposal that one listens to lightly, ”
insists the elected Norman.
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Sébastien Lecornu, taken in the confidence, then summons the figure of Winston Churchill, remembers Édouard Philippe, the one who
"made the choice to change parties to remain faithful to his ideas, rather than change his ideas to remain faithful to his left".
"This wonderful formula says a lot about what happened in 2017, about this spirit of going beyond,"
praised the former head of government, who regularly quotes the former British prime minister.
In an ecumenical mood, the defector from the right therefore called for freedom from
“partisan habits”.
"I have never seen so many people at a meeting for the senatorial
", rejoices Sébastien Lecornu, according to whom the presence of elected representatives from the right as from the left
"is no accident"
.
Édouard Philippe will speak again on Friday, in Angers, on the occasion of the return of the Republic of mayors.
"The blow of the storm, last week, he did not knowingly do it, he did not expect the passage to turn in a loop, decrypts one of his relatives.
What he wants is to continue talking to part of the right, to show that we were not wrong in 2017. "
