French Oppo Rifto : Implosion 2017So in the end, it's the male candidate who was elected as the National Assembly president. De Rugy, who ran in the socialist primary, got bodied there and promptly left the Socialists to carry water for Macron. Principles ! (though LREM has decided this office will be vacated at mid-mandate).
Anyway there was some ruckus yesterday at the Assembly, when it was time to elect the Assembly Vice Presidents (6) and Quaestors (3) (the later are in charge of the finances). Day started slowly -though it is rather ironic in hindsight- with the debate over the France Insoumise MP not wearing "proper attire" (unwritten usage is for men to wear ties and women to wear dresses). Things got heated afterwards.
The norm since the seventies is to give two Vice-Presidencies and one Quaestor to the opposition, and it used to be that all candidates were neatly settled by the different parties before the vote... but not this time.
Right-wing
Les Républicains (LR) party being the biggest opposition group, they expected to get Eric Ciotti into the Quaestor job. But the other dissident
Les Républicains group I mentioned earlier, those "willing to be constructive with the majority" (but still registered as "opposition"), also ran their group president Thierry Solère as a candidate and he was elected thanks to the votes of the Macronist majority.
The LR group was pretty lit up by the whole thing (Ciotti went on TV since then to ask for the excommunication of the "constructives" from the party...) and despite adjourning twice, no solution was found and the LR group decided to boycott the election of the Vice Presidents. Yet the vote carried on and against tradition, all of the vice-presidents are from the majority (5 LREM + 1 MoDem), which elicited some fiery reactions from the far-left Communists and Insoumis. The majority is saying they'll "give back" those posts once "LR stops sulking".
Meanwhile Macron decided he would adress the Congress (Assembly + Senate) in Versailles directly... a day before the Prime Minister goes to the Assembly for the traditional presentation of his General Policy. Calling the Congress is a new thing in French politics (we can again thank former President Sarkozy for this brilliant idea), before that, adresses from the President were written and read by the National Assembly president. It's OK because the President is the brains and the Prime Minister is carrying the execution, or so the official line goes.
The spokesperson for the government also had the bright idea to say that "the press should refrain from weakening the Ministry of Labor" (which as I told earlier may be implicated in not respecting open bids rule for an event in CES with Macron).
Lastly, as to why the President would not give the customary 14th of July TV interview, some inside source justified that Macron's thought was too complex for that.
Macron really is buying in his own "I am Jupiter" stuff, isn't he ?
