Meeting in Dijon, Gabriel Attal and Édouard Philippe call everyone to come together, without proposing a concrete solution

The two central bloc competitors in the presidential election, Gabriel Attal and Édouard Philippe, once again called for a “rally”, but without concrete progress, successively taking the podium on Sunday in Dijon, at the 126th congress of the Radical Party.

“I defend the idea of ​​the broadest possible gathering (...) It is possible to do it from the social democrats to the Republican right,” declared Gabriel Attal in front of nearly 200 supporters and members of the Radical Party, who presented his “manifesto” for the presidential election. “Obviously we have to talk to each other, we have to work together. This is why I proposed a liaison committee a few months ago,” said the secretary general of Renaissance in reference to this discussion framework, created last March and which brings together representatives of the different parties of the central bloc, but not at the candidate level.

Speaking after him, Édouard Philippe recognized that “we will need this gathering in the coming months”. But this gathering must not be made of “an accounting and mechanical addition of partisan devices”, declared the mayor of Le Havre, listing what fundamentally brings these families together: defense of European construction, of a regulated market economy, of State authority, attachment to secularism and the universalist character of the Republic.

He repeated his refusal of a central bloc primary, a process which leads everyone “to accentuate what they are very different from others”. “With the help of enthusiasm - we saw it among the socialist comrades - the tone is rising. As the tone rises, the attacks become more and more ad hominem. And at the end of the process (...) the gaping flaws that were created during the exercise make the gathering hypocritical at best, and at worst impossible,” he described, while the result of the first round of the social democratic primary will be known on Sunday evening.

The two men had not seen each other since the Pope's mass in Paris two weeks ago, which they attended without exchanging a word, separated by the president of the Île-de-France region Valérie Pécresse (LR).

“Obviously, I spoke” to Édouard Philippe, Gabriel Attal told the press, upon leaving the radical congress. “We were sitting next to each other,” he added without elaborating. The two men were filmed exchanging a brief, less-than-warm handshake

Édouard Philippe remains for the moment best placed in the central camp according to the polls.