“I want to tell you recognition of nation”: Emmanuel Macron tries to reconnect with mayors

In the closing of the Mayors Congress in Paris, the President of the Republic tried to defend his assessment and welcomed the action of mayors, on the front line during the crisis of “yellow vests” or during the epidemic of COVID-19.

Le Monde with AFP

If he recognized “misunderstandings at the beginning” of his mandate, Emmanuel Macron attempted to defend his balance sheet, Thursday, November 18, in front of several thousand mayors gathered in congress in Paris. The President of the Republic wished to pay tribute to these ediles, often in the front line during the crisis of “yellow vests” in 2018 or during the epidemic of Covid-19, and which are now facing a rise of the Tensions.

“I want to tell you the recognition of the nation”, who “will be at your side wherever there is a return of violence” against elected officials, he first launched, after the speeches Reviews of the new President of the Association of Mayors of France (AMF), David Lisnard (Republicans), and his vice-president, André Laignel (Socialist Party). “I tasted, where I was, to do what I said, and I think that was the case. And I struggled to adapt, like you elsewhere, to all crises that we have suffered, and we have held, and I thank you for that, “he insisted.

“There may have been misunderstandings at first, there may be prejudices,” Macron then launched Mr. Macron after an enamelled five-year fifth with mayors. The atmosphere was less stormy than during his first intervention in 2017, where he had been whistled by the elected officials. “I assume the fact of not having been mayor, he continued. That’s how I am not the only president of the V e To have been mayor. I understood that General de Gaulle, lately, it may have had the same fault. “

A comparison criticized in the stride by the President of the Party Republicans, Christian Jacob, on its Twitter account . “Emmanuel Macron, in complete gap with the reality and concerns of the French and the mayors of France, he felt. Between sourness and arrogance, he locks himself in electoral incaltations, pushing indecency until Compare General De Gaulle. “

The Head of State defends the abolition of the housing tax

In his speech, the head of state then defended his choices, the abolition of the housing tax for the actions in favor of “city hearts”, ensuring again that he had preserved The resources of the communes, one of the friction points with the leaders of the AMF. “The housing tax was a tax for middle classes, bad for small cities, unfair,” he arraid, while David Lisnard had denounced this suppression earlier, saying that she had been “the last Step of the total destabilization of our local tax system “.

Emmanuel Macron also called upon to avoid “mortiferous” debates that oppose the state to local elected officials. “The state is a whole, there can not be the state against the elected officials,” said the President of the Republic, who had received the day before a thousand elected representatives at the Elysee. The President of the Republic also recognized the “contradictory injunctions” that the mayors suffer, as he himself, admitting that certain decisions are too far from the ground and “descend from above”. One way for him to respond to the criticisms of the AMF leaders, who reproached him “the extreme centralization” of his decisions, that prefects and even ministers “discover on television”.

/Media reports.