Paris (AFP)
Jean Castex on Tuesday enjoined La République en Marche to "win the battle of the territories, as it is at the forefront of that of ideas", while the former Prime Minister Edouard Philippe, defended "the partisan commitment", to the occasion of the fifth anniversary of the party.
The tenant of Matignon and his predecessor, both ex-LR, never took their card from the presidential movement.
They successively expressed themselves in videos broadcast during a "virtual meeting", five years after the creation of En Marche!
by Emmanuel Macron, then Minister of the Economy of François Hollande.
Jean Castex paid tribute to the Head of State, welcoming his "approach (which) was not only the expression of a necessary political renewal, (but) embodied and still embodies a different way of doing" .
"If France has held, if France holds, it is first of all thanks to the decisions of the President of the Republic and the government, but it is also and above all thanks to the solidity of the institutions of the Fifth Republic", he argues.
"This revival claimed, it has nothing of the disagreement or the rejection of the other that certain formations have brought to the heart of their demands, on the contrary it is the bearer of a gathering of enlargement, of going beyond", again launched the current Prime Minister.
But, he warned, "On the march! Must still win the battle of the territories as it is at the forefront of that of ideas", which represents a "long and steep road" but also an "exhilarating task".
His predecessor at the head of government, Edouard Philippe, for his part defended "political parties" as a whole, although he has also not been inserted anywhere since 2017.
"The partisan commitment is respectable, because the constitution of the Fifth Republic says it in the clearest way and, I think, the most decisive possible: + the political parties contribute to the expression of the suffrage +", underlined the one. who was director general of the services of the UMP at its creation.
"We cannot structure a public debate without a political party: (they) have the function of organizing recruitment, training, selecting and nourishing the public debate; it is an eminent democratic responsibility", further considered the Mayor of Le Havre, believing that "the real truth is that a functioning democracy needs political parties".
The favorite political personality of the French, as well as among the only supporters of the right, has again evoked "a form of viscosity of the real, of resistance of the real to transform life as we would like to be able to do it, which is sometimes boring, sometimes difficult and which sometimes can, at bottom, lead to a form of discouragement, to a form of weariness, perhaps even to a form of bitterness ".
"I think that we have to protect ourselves completely from it, I think that we have to keep a very great enthusiasm in front of political action", added Mr. Philippe, omnipresent in the media in recent days on the occasion of the out of his book-story, written with his ex-political advisor Gilles Boyer.
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