As he had done during the disappearance of Jacques Chirac, Emmanuel Macron will address, Thursday, December 3, at 8 p.m. to the French to pay tribute to former President Valéry Giscard d'Estaing, who died the day before at age 94 years old.
During the night, Emmanuel Macron has already greeted in a press release the memory of a head of state whose "seven-year term transformed France".
"The directions he had given to France still guide our steps. Servant of the State, politician of progress and freedom, his death is a mourning for the French nation," he adds.
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- Emmanuel Macron (@EmmanuelMacron) December 3, 2020
Tiny ties between the two presidents
Emmanuel Macron was not yet born [since he was born three years later] when VGE was elected president in 1974, and the latter was no longer in active politics in 2017. Unlike Nicolas Sarkozy and François Hollande, Emmanuel Macron has little had the opportunity to meet VGE, weakened in recent years, and the two men spoke little of each other.
But since the death of the former president, analysts and politicians have emphasized their similarities, starting with their stints at the ENA, the Inspectorate of Finance and the Ministry of the Economy.
Emmanuel Macron, elected at 39, has taken from VGE the title of youngest president of the 5th.
In October 2017, Giscard d'Estaing listed the common qualities that this youth gave them: "physical availability, vitality, freedom and sense of risk".
A few months earlier, he had recognized that Emmanuel Macron looked like him "probably a little", but that he lacked, a difference in size, the experience of power, which he himself had exercised for a very long time in local terms [mayor , regional adviser, deputy] and Finance.
When his successor was experiencing his first political difficulties, in the fall of 2018, VGE warned him that "France is a rather difficult country to reform and if we want to obtain results, we must speak clearly, remain totally calm".
Quoting a Chinese proverb: "When the emperor is restless, the people are sick".
With AFP
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