The RN, "heir of Petain": Macron reframes Borne in the Council of Ministers

"He put a scud on him," says a member of the government, leaving this Wednesday noon of the Council of Ministers. Two days after Elisabeth Borne's remarks on Radio J, when she spoke of the National Rally as a "dangerous ideology", going so far as to describe Marine Le Pen's party as an "heir to Petain", Emmanuel Macron indirectly lectured his Prime Minister in front of his family. A clarification to recall what must be, according to him, the right strategy to knock against his main rival in the last presidential election, namely to attack him "by the concrete", the "real", and not by using "words of the 90s that no longer work". According to one participant, the Prime Minister did not react.

"The old postures to the dad to demonize the RN, as we did thirty years ago, it no longer works. It is naïve to believe that it is enough to quote Pétain to scare away voters. It never even worked. Borne did politics the old-fashioned way," said one minister. "Honestly, I didn't understand why she made this outing. Pétain was the last century. Unfortunately the memory is erased and this kind of reference, it does not scare anyone anymore, "embraces another.

"We must discredit" the RN "by the substance and inconsistencies"

"We must discredit" the RN "by the substance and inconsistencies," continued the President of the Republic from the Salon des ambassadeurs, pointing to Marine Le Pen's economic program, as well as her positions on the European level with systematic alliances with those who have illiberal positions, in allusion to Giorgia Meloni's Italy for example. "These are deadly aggregations," he said.

This reframing in the middle of the Council of Ministers came more generally when commenting on the results of the last legislative elections in Spain, where the far right has become the third political force in the country. And Macron continues his allusion to Borne's remarks, without ever making any distinct reference, to reproach the "moral postures" that no longer take hold in the opinion: "The fight against the far right no longer goes through moral arguments. We will not be able to make millions of French people who voted for her believe that they are fascists. »