President Les Républicains R of the Senate Gérard Larcher warned on Tuesday of the risk of “crises of legitimacy” during a possible next term of Emmanuel Macron if the presidential debate were to be skipped over because of the war in Ukraine.
“We have to be careful, we are now five and a half weeks from the deadline for the first round, if there is no debate, if there is no report, no project, imagine the President of the Republic re-elected, then it will be in a form of omission of democratic debate, with a risk of legitimacy during the mandate”, warned Gérard Larcher on Europe 1.
“We also need to plan for the future of the country”
“I really demand that there be a debate, all minds are in this war, but we must also plan the future of the country for the next five years,” he insisted.
Without these exchanges “essential in a democracy”, “the risks are that a few months later, there will be crises of legitimacy. This is why this debate must take place and it must be engaged. And that is why our candidate Valérie Pécresse is pursuing her campaign with determination,” he added.
For Gérard Larcher, Valérie Pécresse “is the only one who can challenge Emmanuel Macron” because, according to him, Éric Zemmour and Marine Le Pen, the “pro Poutine candidates today cannot hope to be in the second round”, they are “disqualified for the second round”.
VIDEO. When Éric Zemmour and Marine Le Pen did not believe in a Russian offensive in Ukraine
For his part, the spokesman for the LFI candidate Jean-Luc Mélenchon, Alexis Corbière, does not “want” that the presidential debate be “anesthetized” because “this is the time when we have to talk about politics” and “the now or never to say: another world is possible, another vision of the world, other international relations”.
“It has been understood that there is also a strategy, no doubt, on the part of the President of the Republic, which is not entirely cynical because it is very popular, but which is to do as little as possible,” the LFI MP added. RFI. According to him, Macron “will probably declare himself a candidate in a rather sober way, he is almost obliged to do so.”