First campaign committee, debate with the RN… Renaissance finally seems to launch its campaign for the European elections

Tuesday evening, Gabriel Attal organizes the first campaign committee at the Renaissance party headquarters. The opportunity to put on your majority leader costume and finally launch the European campaign.

A few days ago, the Prime Minister confirmed that he was going to debate with Jordan Bardella, the head of the National Rally list for the European elections. Tuesday April 30, he organized the first campaign committee, at the headquarters of the Renaissance party. A timetable which is accelerating before the elections on June 9, while this campaign continues to get underway.

Last Thursday there was Emmanuel Macron’s Sorbonne speech, supposed to give, without really saying it, the starting point. There is the campaign committee Tuesday evening, a debate on television between the Macronist candidate Valérie Hayer and Jordan Bardella, of the RN, Thursday, and next Tuesday, a meeting at La Mutualité in Paris, with perhaps a small gesture of support from Emmanuel Macron.

The “Bardella” threat

“We need to turn off the brain, campaign and stop asking 10,000 questions”says a minister, who calls for “not to fall into defeatism”. It must be said that the polls are catastrophic for Renaissance. Raphaël Glucksmann, on the Socialist Party list, keeps getting closer, even if majority executives continue to say that he is overrated and that he will never get ahead. Conversely, the gap with Jordan Bardella looks more and more like a chasm.

A difference which can lead to a feeling of powerlessness in the face of candidate Bardella. “Everything flows over him like water over a duck’s feathers”, laments a minister who describes him as “soap candidate of a catch-all party”. Others in government even go so far as to worry about “media monster” that we should now try to push for mistakes, as during his last press conference, where he did not answer journalists’ questions. “We need to make him talk about Europe, about substantive issues, said a little hand from the countryside. It’s not infallible.”

There also remains the feeling of the weariness of power. “People have already voted for us 7-8-9 times since 2017”, grimaces another minister, even if the tendency, sometimes to the point of denial, is to convince oneself that all is not lost, that there is one month left to wake up the pro-European Macron electorate. A campaign framework summarizes: “Mass is not said.”

A final “sprint”

No miracle solution, “no magic wand” so, but “the last month is a sprint” says the Renaissance staff, which announces 600,000 campaign leaflets, 200,000 posters, as if the campaign team wanted to show firepower.

In particular, there will be the presentation of the candidates on Friday during a seminar at the party’s headquarters in Paris. Initial lists are circulating, but negotiations are still ongoing. “It’s not having your name on the list that counts but knowing your place, and they are expensive,” recognizes an incoming potential, which is waiting. And Monday, before the meeting at La Mutualité, it will be the presentation of the campaign proposals.

While on Wednesday, when the National Rally will make its big rally on 1^er May in Perpignan, Gabriel Attal, presented on his arrival in Matignon as the anti-Bardella weapon, will be at the Beaugency fair in the Loiret, after the whelk fair this weekend. The fairs, favored campaign locations for a year for the boss of the RN. Behind the scenes, we repeat the expression “It’s at the end of the fair that we count the dung.”