The president of the Les Républicains (LR) group in the Senate, Bruno Retailleau, proposes to “completely change the law” on sponsorships “to finally ensure complete anonymity for elected officials who wish to sponsor such and such a candidate”. According to him, a mayor risks being the victim of physical violence for having sponsored one of them, while Marine Le Pen, Éric Zemmour or Jean-Luc Mélenchon are struggling to collect the 500 signatures required to be presidential candidate.
“In a few years, violence against elected officials has tripled”, observed the one who is also responsible for preparing the first 100 days of a possible mandate for Valérie Pécresse, LR candidate for the Élysée. He also pointed out that “Social networks are also a form of violence”. “If we don’t want to throw our elected officials out, we have to protect them” and “this protection is necessarily anonymity”he insisted.
The issue of sponsorships is one of the “contingencies” to which the campaign is “suspended”he analyzed, just like “the succession of crises”. “We are almost leaving the health crisis to enter an international crisis”, he explained, alluding to the Ukrainian crisis. Other “contingency”and not least, “all the players have to be on the pitch”. Gold, “This is not the case”he pointed out, while Emmanuel Macron is slow to formalize his candidacy for a second term.
“Jupiter does not want to come down from Olympus, he wants to try to span this campaign”, he denounced. According to him, the outgoing president “refuses to debate, refuses this democratic game to evade its own record” who is “one of the worst of the Fifth Republic”.
According to Bruno Retailleau, “the mind” the French “is not in the countryside, they will return there late, not before the second half of March”, when the list of candidates has been published. For him, “This is where the choices will be made”. “Everything is possible, nothing is decided and I think that the qualification of the second round will be done in a small pocket handkerchief”he said, while the campaign of Valérie Pécresse is experiencing difficulties.