France’s centrist politicians regain ‘freedom’ from Macron

Former French prime minister Edouard Philippe has been criss-crossing the north-eastern Alsace region in support of his party’s MPs who are facing tough re-election battles against far-right opponents on Sunday.

Horizons is the liberal conservative wing of Emmanuel Macron’s three-way centrist alliance. But the party is campaigning under its own banner and its leaflets make no mention of the president at all.

Philippe is treading a fine line between loyalty to Macron and charting his own path leading up to the presidential election, due in 2027, when Macron’s second and final term will end.

This balancing act was “a lot simpler now” that the president had called snap elections and ended the government, Philippe told the Financial Times on a campaign stop in Wissembourg, a pretty town of half-timbered houses on the border with Germany.

“By definition, I’ve regained my complete freedom,” he said. His ambition is to build a broader majority spanning centre-left and centre-right to replace the outgoing centrist administration.

Philippe, who was Macron’s premier in the first three years of his presidency, remains one of France’s most popular politicians. One survey last weekend ranked him as the people’s preferred candidate for president, ahead of Marine Le Pen, leader of the far-right Rassemblement National.

It was always likely that Philippe — and other presidential hopefuls such as Prime Minister Gabriel Attal and finance minister Bruno Le Maire — would distance themselves from Macron as 2027 approached. The snap election has accelerated the process.

It is a sign of the tensions unleashed within the governing coalition by Macron’s shock dissolution of parliament and of his tarnished political brand.

Many of the president’s allies believe it was a colossal mistake to call snap elections with Le Pen’s RN on a roll after winning the European parliament vote and with three weeks to attack its credibility. Macron said it was a moment to bring the French around from their political “fever”.

Philippe, now the mayor of Le Havre, a port city in Normandy, makes no secret of his disapproval of the decision, saying it had caused “surprise, astonishment, sometimes anger”. Last week he told TF1 television the president had “killed” the governing majority.

“He decided all alone to dissolve,” Philippe told the FT. “Well, fine. In that case, we need to build something different.”

His supporters see Macron as an electoral liability. “If you say voting for one of Edouard Philippe’s candidates is voting for Emmanuel Macron, there is an immediate rejection. Immediate!” said one ally.

France was probably entering a new political “configuration” under which the president no longer controlled the government and assumed a different institutional role, the former premier said. Macron was neither a parliamentarian nor a party leader, so the new majority and government that emerges after the election “will not come from him”.

Philippe is not alone in observing that political power is already shifting away from the president, even if the centrists defy pollsters’ expectations of a wipeout and somehow manage to assemble a majority of moderate MPs.

Attal, who is leading the election campaign for Macron’s Ensemble alliance, said France would become a “more parliamentary system”.

He told BFM TV last week that for the first time in two decades the premier would have a mandate from the people, unlike in normal times when legislative elections follow straight after the presidential ballot, putting the premiership in the president’s gift.

Philippe confirmed to the FT that he had asked Macron to stay out of the election campaign.

At a time of political turbulence, it was “imperative” for the president, as the guarantor of institutions, to stay above the fray. “If he became an actor in the campaign, a possible defeat would weigh on the Presidency of the Republic, not just on the man, a risk that I believe to be dangerous.”

Not everyone in the Macron camp shares his views. François Patriat, a veteran senator and early backer of Macron, said that “If tomorrow we have to build a coalition, [Macron] needs to be strong to lead it and he must lead it. Nobody else — and certainly not Edouard Philippe.”

The former PM is blamed for being inflexible during the 2018 gilets jaunes protests, a grassroots movement against falling living standards that marred the early years of Macron’s presidency.

“Macron owes all his troubles to Philippe,” added Patriat.

But the former PM’s reputation for quiet competence still seems to hold among voters in Alsace.

“I always had confidence in him, in what he says and the way he led the country,” said a passer-by in Wissembourg. Isabelle, a market trader described Philippe as a “very good prime minister” who she had “a lot of respect for”, even though recently she had voted for the far-right.

Philippe’s enduring appeal may not be enough to save Stéphanie Kochert, a local MP for his Horizons party, who is facing a tight race against the far-right. Voters “feel they have tried everything else and are willing to give them [the RN] a go”, she said. “People are really angry and fed-up.”

Philippe is not running for a parliamentary seat himself, perhaps a sign that he fears an electoral rout. French voters wanted change, not a wake-up call from the president, he said.

“I don’t think we can win . . . saying: ‘We’ll do exactly the same things before, you have not properly understood us’.”

Additional reporting by Leila Abboud in Paris