François Fillon describes the period as "cohabitation" when he was at Matignon and Nicolas Sarkozy at the Élysée (2007-2012) and said he had proposed his resignation "two or three times" in a documentary to be broadcast on Tuesday. France 2.
The former Prime Minister is speaking for the first time on television since his failure in the 2017 presidential elections in this documentary, Fifth Republic, in the heart of power , on the occasion of the sixty years of the Constitution, directed by Gabriel Le Bomin and co-authored with Patrice Duhamel, but does not mention the case of alleged fictitious jobs concerning his family for which he is indicted.
"We found a pretty good balance". About his debut in Matignon, "it's part of the difficult times in the relationship between Nicolas Sarkozy and me, it's part of the times where two or three times, I proposed my resignation but, paradoxically, it's the first months of this coexistence between the President of the Republic and me who have been difficult, "says François Fillon.
"And, as time passed, the crises passed, as time passed, we found a balance that was perhaps not very visible from the outside, but which finally was a pretty good balance," he continues. .
"It's the five-year presidents, not the prime ministers." The former president explains for his part that he was "very struck by Jacques Chirac saying: 'I asked my Prime Minister Jean-Pierre Raffarin to make every effort to reduce unemployment'. (...) Me, I did not see myself see the French and say to them: 'I asked François Fillon to do this or to do that' ", he defends himself.
"I did it or I did not, I did it or I failed it, but we're elected to do it, not to say we're going to do." It's the president's five-year term, it's not the Five-Year Prime Minister, "he theorizes again.
Over the five-year period, relations were often complicated between François Fillon and Nicolas Sarkozy, who had notably cringe when calling his prime minister a mere "collaborator".