“What should a Northern man drink here?” he asks Édouard Philippe sitting at aperitif time on the canal in Sète, the small town in the South of France where Georges Brassens and Paul Valéry, among others, were born. They bring him a pac à l’eau (a kind of lemonade, because here we are close to Montpellier and pastis is something for the people of Marseille, they explain), then the mayor of Le Havre, a thousand kilometers further up, speaks with the local candidates of his party Horizons and presents the idea for getting out of the French political crisis: «We should learn to do something normal in many large countries, that is govern with a grand coalition». In essence, the former prime minister proposes to try what Macron, due to his character or political incapacity, has never really bent on doing: widen the majority, negotiate, convince, come to terms with the more moderate parts of the right and the left, but without aiming to empty them. Winning partners, not spoils of war.
«Macron’s majority is dead, and it is the president who killed it. But we have a solution at hand that would avoid us ending up in the pincer formed by the Rassemblement national on the right and France Insoumise on the left.” It seems like a government of national unity, a solution reminiscent of pre-Meloni Italy, we point out. «Italy has always been a political example. Or rather, Italy has always been aware of political situations and has to make decisions which then also arise in France and which we too end up having to face. We French should observe Italy more, its difficulties, its contradictions and its solutions.”
Like many French people in love with our country – «Sicily, but also Milan, Bologna, Pisa and Lucca» -, and an admirer of its political alchemies, Philippe pronounces the de profundis of the Macronist majority but already wants to go beyond the hasty recomposition of these days, with three opposing blocs – right, left and a weaker Macronist center – which seem to be competing for victory. The first prime minister of the Macron era, then accompanied back to Le Havre when he was becoming too popular for the president’s tastes, he dreams of a coalition that goes from the anti-Bardella Gaullist right to the anti-Mélenchon moderate leftfrom Xavier Bertrand to Raphaël Glucksmann, «a coalition that would represent the majority of the French, who do not want the RN at all nor a Nouveau Front Populaire that includes not only Jean-Luc Mélenchon but also those who are even more to the left than him, such as New Anti-Capitalist Party.”
In the days in which Emmanuel Macron evokes a possible “civil war in the event of victory of the extremes” and we are already thinking about possibilities riots in the suburbs in the event of victory of the anti-foreigner party of Jordan Bardella and Marine Le Pen, Edouard Philippe’s calm style continues to stand out, as it always has in recent years. If Macron ended up being hated by many because he was perceived as arrogant, harsh, unsuitable for listening and therefore for compromising, Philippe is a strange example of a hyper-diploma (the usual path of the elite, Sciences Po then Ena) who however is basically nice to everyone: perhaps because he takes problems very seriously, and himself not very seriously.
His best friend director Laurent Cibien (left-wing) dedicated a three-part documentary to him entitled «Edouard, my right-wing friend», in which he films him from his victorious re-election in Le Havre in 2014 to the dramatic phase of the management of Covid, as prime minister, in spring 2020. «Putain, how tired I am. I’m cooked! », He admits in front of the camera in the days of lockdown. “I only have bad options, some worse than others, and none of them are good, it’s scary.”
And yet in the evening Philippe spoke on TV to the French in a clear, competent, precise way, without fanfare. From those days at Matignon Edouard Philippe learned the breakdown of the agreement with Macron (who preferred the colorless Jean Castex), a lot of stress and two autoimmune diseases, vitiligo and alopecia: first white spots on the beard, then spots on the skin and finally no more hair. “I understood what eyebrows are for,” he says of his obvious physical transformation, “to get noticed when they fall out.”
A great and affectionate imitator of Giscard d’Estaing, gifted with humor but deliberately never sharp, in these hours Edouard Philippe is among the few opponents of the RN to respect its voters: «It’s too easy to love democracy as long as democracy agrees with me”. But he does not give up criticizing Bardella’s announcement, which would like to keep French people with dual passports away from strategic jobs. After all, we are in Sète, the city of Georges Brassens who in The Ballad of Those Born Somewhere took it out on chauvinists and nationalists. And Philippe says that «the controversy against the bi-nationals reveals something profound in the Rassemblement national: their need to divide, and create different categories of French. I don’t like”.
