Close to Emmanuel Macron, but also to Nicolas Sarkozy, the essayist Alain Minc believes that the head of state is on the wrong track for the regional elections.
Displayed support from the president for 2022, he recommends that he skip the line and give up presenting candidates in the regions.
Alain Minc also specifies that he will vote Pécresse in Ile-de-France.
He considers that it would be wasting the talent of Jean-Michel Blanquer to send him to “bite the calves” of Valérie Pécresse.
He adds that in his eyes, LREM is not a party, but “a collection of individuals” and that the electorate of Emmanuel Macron has vocation for example to vote for the socialist Alain Rousset in New Aquitaine or the LR Jean Rottner in Grand Est.
Entangled in the health and economic crisis, Emmanuel Macron wants to revive the end of his five-year term "by accelerating" the pace of reforms.
Is it still possible?
ALAIN MINC.
Accelerating until the end of the mandate was possible in normal times, it seems very difficult at this degree of crisis and constraint.
There will therefore be things that this government can do ... but it will probably not be able to undertake ten reforms.
You have doubts why?
I do not believe for a second that he can return to the field of pensions, for example.
As the budgetary situation worsened significantly during Covid-19, we will have no other solution than to delay the retirement age.
And that is not a possible issue just one year away from a presidential election.
Common sense would therefore be to postpone all this until after 2022. Where we can hope that we will be out of the tunnel, with a period of real economic rebound.
What can Emmanuel Macron do in the time that remains to him?
Its imperative is twofold: to get the country out of the health crisis as well as possible and to continue its policy of European construction which is, in my view, the great success of this five-year term.
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So you are not talking about the regional next June.
Are they already lost for the majority?
I am a fan of the re-election of Emmanuel Macron in 2022, but I think that the strategy he is taking for the regions is not the right one.
He is President of the Republic, he must consider himself above parties.
So why is he looking for candidates everywhere?
With the risk of having to endure, eight months before the presidential election, a score as bad as the municipal ones.
It would seem to me to be common sense that his electors join, for example, Madame Pécresse in Ile-de-France, Monsieur Rousset in New Aquitaine, or Monsieur Rottner in the Grand Est.
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But can a presidential party not have a candidate?
Is it really a party on the move?
Rather, it is a movement, a collection of individuals.
I am not throwing stones at them, but a party is anchored in a history, a common memory.
This is not the case with LREM today, especially in a period of individualism and the absence of activism which for three years has gone against party life.
Macron is therefore wrong to push certain ministers to go?
This is a major mistake.
And I hope that great figures of macronism, like Jean-Michel Blanquer, will not go astray in this.
You have to be reasonable.
And in the name of this reasoning, I can assure you that if I will vote with both hands for Macron in 2022, I will also vote with both hands for Pécresse at the regional level.
Even if Blanquer is a candidate against her?
Absolutely, because I think his candidacy is irrelevant.
I don't see what he's doing in there.
We have here a minister who fulfills his functions well when they are extremely difficult, at a time when the educational issue is major because of the Covid-19.
And we would like this talent to go to waste to bite the calves of Valérie Pécresse, someone with whom he is basically in agreement?
It's ridiculous.
It does not make sense.
Field policy is not the same as leading a ministry as heavy as that of rue de Grenelle.
And then to be elected, you have to say something.
I would like someone to explain to me what Jean-Michel Blanquer is going to say original about Ile-de-France ...
Pécresse is doing a good job?
I have great respect for Valérie Pécresse on a personal basis.
She did something formidable, that no man would have known how to do: it is the relocation of the headquarters of the region to Saint-Ouen.
It is very courageous.
In the same way that if I lived in Bordeaux I would vote Rousset, a socialist.
Or for Rottner, a centrist, if I lived in the Grand Est.
Frankly, that sounds like common sense to me.
And so, in this logic, Macron ends his five-year term without local elected officials, without relays in the territories?
It doesn't matter in today's world.
A presidential election, he showed in 2017, is played out in social networks, not in the distribution of leaflets in the markets.
Its only subject is to maintain the base of popularity it has.
Jean Castex announced the extension of the curfew.
He has taken all the criticisms since he has been at Matignon ...
Finally, we come back to a normal functioning of the institutions of the Fifth Republic, where the Prime Minister is the shield of the president and not the other way around!
And in this role of shield, with Saint-Sébastien receiving the arrows, Castex completely fulfills the job description that Raymond Barre had marvelously defined by saying "the Prime Minister is here to last and endure".