Silence and regret weigh heavily in the corridors of the Elysée

On March 24, 1993, French President François Mitterrand presided over the last Council of Ministers of the Socialist legislature, a few days before the second round of the legislative elections. The fate of his majority was sealed and a cohabitation with the right loomed on the horizon. “On Monday, an enormous weight will weigh on you all, a great mourning, from which we believe we will never recover, but the forces of life are always stronger,” he declared to his distraught ministers at the Elysée.

“Stay or go?” asks the old president, whom the press imagines as Louis XVI. He fled to Varennes. “I have no intention of fleeing,” he insisted, despite the urgent demands of Jacques Chirac, the leader of the conservatives, for him to resign. Then he declared: “We can fear isolation, but in reality, we are never truly alone, except in the face of death. Continue the fight. I will do it my way. The strangulation will not be done in silence or in the shadows.” That same evening, Mitterrand instructed his prime minister, Pierre Bérégovoy, and his foreign minister, Roland Dumas, to remind Chirac how the system worked.

A faded portrait of Mitterrand, exhumed in 2017 from behind a The office of the President of the Republic is today located in the office of the current President’s advisor for historical matters, Bruno Roger-Petit, a fervent supporter of the dissolution, decreed on June 9. But Dumas is no more. He died on Wednesday, July 3, at the age of 101, the very day that Macron chaired the last Council of Ministers before the second round of the legislative elections in which his majority has no chance of being renewed.

At the Salon des Ambassadeurs, the president repeated that the objective was to prevent the National Rally (RN) from having an absolute majority, while specifying that there was “no question” of “governing tomorrow” with La France Insoumise (LFI), despite the mutual withdrawals between the candidates of the former majority and those of the New Popular Front (NFP) to block the RN. The ministers, who did not all agree on these arrangements, remained silent, their faces closed. The meeting lasted less than three-quarters of an hour. A drink was served at the end. “I’m going to shake all of your hands,” Mitterrand had declared thirty years ago.

No specific instructions

Just before, the members of the government had to wait for an hour in an adjoining lounge, waiting for Macron. Fadila Khattabi and Patricia Miralles, who both had to withdraw from their constituencies, were chatting in a corner. “I had to withdraw in favor of a PFN MP who is not even guaranteed to win,” said Miralles, the Secretary of State for Veterans Affairs, who believes that her constituency was being nibbled away by the RN. For the two ministers, it is the end of an adventure. “I hope that the French will remember the good things we have done,” said Khattabi, Minister for Disabled People, whose parents arrived in France from Algeria in the 1950s. Three days earlier, during a meeting at the Elysée, she wept with emotion at the idea of ​​the far right approaching power.

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