"Everything is going very well": Elisabeth Borne ensures to have "a very fluid relationship" with Emmanuel Macron

Europe 1 with AFP / Photo credits: JEAN-FRANCOIS MONIER / AFP 17:27 pm, June 01, 2023

"Everything is going very well": Elisabeth Borne assured Thursday to have "a very fluid relationship" with Emmanuel Macron, after several days of floating in the executive couple around the riposte to bring to the National Rally. "What matters to me is that we act to meet the priorities of the French," said the head of government on the sidelines of a trip to Mayenne, estimating that "the rest is a storm in a glass of water".

>> READ ALSO – Elisabeth Borne will she stay at Matignon? Confusion reigns in government

A statement on the RN at the origin of this apparent quarrel

On Wednesday, Emmanuel Macron had taken the trouble to reiterate all his "confidence" in the tenant of Matignon, after having yet seemed to reframe the day before about how to counter the National Rally (RN). At the origin of this apparent quarrel, an interview given Sunday by Elisabeth Borne to Radio J, during which she had estimated that the party of Marine Le Pen was an "heir of Pétain" carrying a "dangerous ideology" and whose ideas should not be "trivialized".

During the Council of Ministers, two days later, Emmanuel Macron had called not to fight the far right "by moral arguments" but by "the substance" and "the concrete", according to several participants. These presidential remarks had been strongly criticized by the other oppositions.

Speculation about a possible change of prime minister

If he assured that he was not in the habit of reframing his Prime Minister in public or even in the Council of Ministers, Emmanuel Macron had nevertheless assumed a position distinct from that of Elisabeth Borne, Wednesday, at a press conference in Bratislava, on the sidelines of a trip to Slovakia.

>> READ ALSO – RN "heir of Pétain": why was Borne reframed by Macron publicly?

He said that the far right could no longer be "beaten "simply with historical and moral arguments" (the term "historical" referring directly to the reference to Philippe Pétain, the French head of state who collaborated with Nazi Germany). This new episode had revived speculation about a possible change of head of government.