Paris (AFP)

"Of all the risks" linked to the Covid crisis, "the political risk" seems the most dangerous to former Prime Minister Edouard Philippe, not sure that "the next" to exercise power "are as enlightened" as they are now , he says in a documentary.

"The health risk, I think it will eventually be okay", predicted Mr. Philippe in April 2020, in the third part of the documentary "Edouard mon pote de droit", broadcast Sunday in preview at Fipadoc in Biarritz and soon on France 5.

"The economic risk, the financial risk", too.

"But then the political risk! Given the impoverishment, the fear, the destabilizations ... I do not guarantee that the next ones will be as enlightened", he worried, at the heart of the first confinement.

In this nearly three-hour film directed by his friend Laurent Cibien and entitled "Aux joyettes", Mr. Philippe looks back on his three years at Matignon, through regular conversations in his office that capture the atmosphere of the moment, the doubts and issues surrounding certain major decisions.

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"Here you manage the imperfect world," he explains in 2018 to Mr. Cibien, who has been following his path for nearly twenty years.

But "what I like fundamentally in the act of governing is to be in the situation where it is you who stick to it", he adds.

At the beginning of November 2018, we also see Mr. Philippe assert that the first manifestation of the "yellow vests" does not "particularly worry" him, before backpedaling on the carbon tax "because a gesture of appeasement was necessary", then to release several billion to calm the anger.

"I'm never a fan of measures that increase the debt. There is a time when it will cost us dearly. But I'm not a hysteric," he slips at the end of 2018, while confiding his concern to see one day France in the same financial situation as Greece.

"People who say the opposite are nuts," he asserts.

Sometimes "exhausted", "cooked" by crises, Mr. Philippe is also staged month after month in the management of the Covid, until his departure from Matignon on July 3, 2020.

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"I have the impression of driving a bus, I have people behind, I have one brake out of two that does not work, there is fog, ice, we are on a mountain road, and you have five guys on the bus who tell you to go left, right, and others who tell you not to crash, "he summarized in April 2020.

At the beginning of June 2020, just before the second round of municipal elections in Le Havre, he confides that he will resign whatever happens, victory or defeat, to Emmanuel Macron "because when you ask voters to trust you, he is urban to leave the choice to the president to trust you again or not ".

But could Mr. Macron keep it?

"He trusts me, I'm practical. I don't want to take his place, I don't want to stab him, I don't say what he tells me, I'm pretty loyal, I land complicated things. But that does not mean that he will keep me, "he emphasizes.

As to whether he could one day become President of the Republic himself one day, Mr. Philippe, who had swept aside the hypothesis by laughing twenty years ago in front of Mr. Cibien's camera, is a bit embarrassed : "It is not a light question, it is a rather complicated question".

© 2021 AFP