🇫🇷 Chronic infighting
Elisabeth Borne fights uphill battle against Gabriel Attal, Government implosion over Assemblée VP role, and the Paris prosecutor's office investigates anti-Semitism on metro
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This week
🥊Elisabeth Borne fights uphill battle against Gabriel Attal
💥Government implosion over Assemblée VP role
✡️Paris prosecutor investigates anti-Semitism on metro
🥊Elisabeth Borne fights uphill battle against Attal
So let’s start this week off with an interesting story coming from Emmanuel Macron’s party, Renaissance, which is currently in the midst of an internal election campaign to elect the next leader of the party.
Currently led by Commissioner designate Stéphane Séjourné, his successor is now guaranteed to be a former Prime Minister, with both Gabriel Attal (Jan-Sept 2024) and Elisabeth Borne (2022-2024) fighting it out.
The problem is that one of these individuals is far more popular than the other, and this is causing problems for one of these campaigns.
Currently, the mentality within the Renaissance Party is that the next leader of the party needs to be the person who they can construct a project around and who will be able to become the next candidate to become President of the French Republic.
This means, effectively, that it has to be someone young, dynamic, popular, and who the party militants believe will be able to elbow veterans like Edouard Philippe, Gerald Darmanin, and Bruno Le Maire out of the way.
The new leader will also need to be able to defeat either Marine Le Pen or her Protege, Jordan Bardella, as well as far-left firebrand Jean-Luc Mélenchon in what will be a brutal election cycle.
Unfortunately, it’s looking like support for Elisabeth Borne is slipping out of her hands, with attempts to meet with senior members of the party, such as deputy secretary Franck Riester, going poorly as she is told again and again that they will vote for her rival.
She had already apparently been promised support by several MPs, such as former Minister delegate for Agriculture, Agnès Pannier-Runacher, which was denied publicly, with Darmanin likewise having distanced himself from the candidate according to Le Monde.
This is where her tenacity and her ability to fight against impossible odds is shining through, as she continues to fight for a potential victory over Gabriel Attal, no matter how unlikely it is.
The reality is, she is unlikely to succeed in her gambit, as the support is simply not there and Gabriel Attal constructed an incredibly strong bases in his very short premiership, but she appear to be happy to keep fighting.
One explanation for this is that she seems keen to clear her name, with a book publication (Twenty Months in Matignon) which seems to be intended to settle scores with her former colleagues and clear any blame that s being levied at her.
But we’ll have to see if it works.
💥Government implosion over Assemblée VP role
Aside from this, there are scores being settled across the Assemblée National, with a vote on a Vice President of the Assemblée veering into farce.
So, Annie Genevard (LR) was given the position of Minister of Agriculture, Food Sovereignty and Forestry in the Barnier government, meaning she had to vacate her position as Vice-President in the Assemblée National and launching some elections.
However, following three rounds of voting, the entire event turned into a comical farce as an ecologist deputy, Isère Jérémie Iordanoff (NFP) beat his competitor Virginie Duby-Muller (LR) by 14 votes.
Despite the fact that the government coalition has 19 more seats than Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s Nouveau Front Populaire.
Immediately recriminations started flying, with Les Républicains accusing their Macronist allies of either lying or not managing to drum up support, while the Macronists blamed their old coalition partners, MoDem, of engaging in useless games.
However, regardless of all of this, the simple reality is that the Government now no longer have a majority within the bureau of the Assemblée National, and the coalition continues to be weakened.
With less and less of a coherent strategy, we can expect the government to become more disjointed and for more conflicts to break out into the open, further weakening the legitimacy of Prime Minister Michel Barnier.
This will increasingly begin to force the political situation in the Assemblée National to unravel, with various actors across the board already preparing for an anticipated legislative election in July of this year (which your favourite editor believes is very likely)
✡️Paris prosecutor investigates anti-Semitism on metro
Moving on to a growing problem in France, we’ve seen a newfound example of just how low society is sinking, as the above image circulated over social media.
Taken on the Line 13 Metro in Paris, this man was very clearly showcasing his antisemitism, for reasons that are probably fairly easy to guess, on the back of his football t-shirt.
Naturally, there was an explosion in complaints regarding this, and the Paris authorities have now opened an investigation into this awful, awful human being. The investigation, led by the Paris prosecutor's office, came after a report from Paris Police Prefect Laurent Nuñez, who was alerted to the photo circulating on social media.
Nuñez says that he directed his team to refer the incident to prosecutors without hesitation, having taken a “zero tolerance” position regarding the “propagators of hatred.”
He also added that the regional transport security police were working to identify and arrest the individual involved, and the Paris prosecutor’s office has confirmed that it has classified the offense as public incitement to racial hatred.
Under French law, such an offense can lead to up to a year in prison.
This incident is part of a troubling trend that we’re seeing in France, and in the wider world, of rising anti-Semitic incidents across France.
Former Interior Minister Gérald Darmanin had published a statement earlier this year that anti-Semitic acts in the country had tripled in the first half of 2024 compared to the same period in 2023, with nearly 900 incidents recorded.
Naturally, the individual in question was identified fairly quickly, and the police service had requested that the individual undergo a psychiatric examination, which “found no abnormalities, alterations or abolition of discernment”.
The individual has now been put into custody as of this past thursday, and while the individual in question has been named publicly, we won’t be doing that here.
Instead, please do read this statement from the Paris Police Prefect:
“The regional transport security of the police prefecture has conducted with commitment, on my instructions, the investigation for provocation to racial hatred. The numerous investigations, as soon as the facts were reported, quickly allowed the investigators to identify the suspected individual.
I would like to acknowledge the remarkable work of the police officers whose diligences forced the individual, who knew he was wanted, to report last night to the investigators.”
Now we can only hope that this individual is made an example of.
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