François Hollande was invited to speak about the war in Ukraine. But on Wednesday 6 March, from the first floor of the Elysée Palace, the former socialist president and Emmanuel Macron are mainly discussing French politics. It is a question of tactics. The worried head of state is desperately seeking to increase his too relative majority in Parliament. “You are leading a right-wing policy. We must form an alliance with the right”the former first secretary of the PS decides. “I didn’t do all that to get here”sighs Emmanuel Macron.
Six months later, the former investment banker, briefly in the PS, defender of the “at the same time”, “arrived there”. After an untimely dissolution of the National Assembly and a bitter failure in the legislative elections, the President of the Republic appointed, on the evening of Saturday 21 September, a government of thirty-nine ministers that mixed a young Macronist guard with a dozen elected representatives representing a very conservative right. “A reactionary government in the form of an arm of honour of democracy”, according to the first secretary of the PS, Olivier Faure.
The Republicans (LR) present in the new team are not predominant. But their profile revives a so-called “Fillonist” right, named after Nicolas Sarkozy’s former Prime Minister, François Fillon, unsuccessful candidate in the 2017 presidential election. A conservative Catholic right embodied by the Vendée senator, Bruno Retailleau, appointed to the Ministry of the Interior.
Very close to Philippe de Villiers, before breaking with the sovereignist, who in his youth was a rider in the Puy du Fou show, shocked in July 2023 by speaking, on the subject of young people from neighborhoods of immigrant origin, of a “regression towards ethnic origins” or assuming, in February 2022, the term borrowed from the far right of “French paper” to talk about naturalized citizens.
This right opposed to gay marriage is also represented by the names of lesser-known ministers and secretaries of state, such as Patrick Hetzel (higher education) or Laurence Garnier (consumerism), senator, figure of La Manif pour tous, opposed to the criminalisation of conversion therapy: practices aimed at “treating” homosexual people to make them renounce their sexual orientation or gender identity. As if politics had taken a step backwards following the appointment of Gabriel Attal, the youngest Prime Minister of the Vmy Republic, who stated during his general policy speech in January: “Being French in 2024 means being able to be Prime Minister while accepting your homosexuality.”
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