Europe 1 with AFP 11:04 a.m., March 2, 2022
Jean-Pierre Raffarin announced this Wednesday to support Emmanuel Macron for the presidential election.
The former Prime Minister felt that the Head of State was up to one of the "most difficult five-year terms in our history", and called for people to come together behind him in the midst of an international crisis.
Former Prime Minister Jean-Pierre Raffarin on Wednesday gave his support for the presidential election to Emmanuel Macron, "the youngest and most experienced" and who, according to him, "has everything in hand to succeed in his second term".
"This five-year term will undoubtedly remain as one of the most difficult in our history: the president, in my opinion, has lived up to the function, I wish his candidacy and I will support him", announced on LCI the former chief. of the government of Jacques Chirac (2002-2005) who left LR several years ago.
"Emmanuel Macron is both the youngest and the most experienced candidate, it is rare to be young and experienced and I know that it is very important today to succeed in a second term to have the lesson of successes but also the failures of the previous mandate", he explained, adding that "to succeed in his second mandate, he has everything in hand".
"I have thought a lot about this subject because I have consideration and affection for Valérie Pécresse, but the dangerousness of the international situation today removes all hesitation, the time has come for national unity, we must come together behind the head of our executive," he said.
Pécresse "not a dam on the far right"
"I don't want the (presidential) debate to be skipped over, so that's why I want the president to be able to declare his candidacy quickly because it's from the quality of the debate that the legitimacy of the election will come. election," he warned.
"I will support the efforts of my friend Édouard Philippe, in whom I have full confidence to build what my political family has always been, that is to say a new center right", added Jean-Pierre Raffarin, who wants to "ensure that we enlarge the majority of Emmanuel Macron".
"It is not because we support Macron that we have become socialists", he specified, seeing rather in the movement of Edouard Philippe, Horizons, "a return to a kind of new UDF".
"I think that Valérie Pécresse does not have this capacity today to be a dam on the far right and therefore, for safety, it is clear that those who want a dam on the far right have to vote Macron" , he argued.
The support of the former Prime Minister was immediately welcomed on Twitter by the Deputy President of the LREM Group at the National Assembly Aurore Bergé, who said she was "very happy to find Jean Pierre Raffarin at our side in this presidential campaign" .