La Ciotat (AFP) – Édouard Philippe underlined on Saturday his “differences” with the President of the Republic during a public meeting in La Ciotat (Bouches-du-Rhône), assuming to have been his Prime Minister but regretting that the initial promise “got lost in limbo”.

Published on: 07/11/2026 - 15:21

“I am not the same,” said the Horizons presidential candidate, believing that we can “easily do much better” to “restore accounts, order, the power, the influence of our country”.

The candidate highlighted his “differences” with Emmanuel Macron. “I am not proposing the same foreign policy in terms of relations with a certain number of our neighbors south of the Mediterranean, as the one he implemented,” underlined the mayor of Le Havre, who proposed denouncing the Franco-Algerian migration agreement of 1968.

"I am not proposing the same method or the same reform in terms of pensions", and "I am not proposing to make people from different camps work" because "I want to bring together the right and the center", he again underlined, addressing in passing a small dig at Gabriel Attal, his Renaissance rival: "he is another candidate who develops the idea that we should create the right and the left at the same time".

Édouard Philippe, who has long distanced himself from Emmanuel Macron and his two five-year terms, reiterated his “regrets” on Saturday.

“What I regret is that the initial promise, which was not perfect and which was not implemented perfectly (...) was lost in limbo,” he said.

If he defended his own record and said he did not "apologize" for having been Prime Minister from 2017 to 2020, he regretted that his concern to restore the accounts "was not shared once the Covid was over", and that the points pension reform that he had painfully pushed through was "then abandoned", in reality interrupted by the Covid epidemic.

© 2026 AFP

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