"Everyone must play their part": Wauquiez charges Retailleau before the election for the LR presidency

A decisive end to the campaign. As Republicans members prepare to vote for their president this weekend, Bruno Retailleau and Laurent Wauquiez each held their final major rally.

For the Republican Right MP, his meeting was held in Jonage in Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes, the region he chaired from 2016 to 2024. And his last intervention was particularly virulent towards the Minister of the Interior.

"From the moment you agree to join a team, well, you don't criticize the President of the Republic because you agreed to sit on the Council of Ministers every week," he said to his supporters.

"Bruno said he wanted to be Interior Minister and that it was his priority. That's fine and could be very useful, but not combined with being President of the Republicans. Otherwise, the Republicans' voice won't be able to put pressure on François Bayrou to get things moving in the areas where we expect him to," said Laurent Wauquiez.

"Who can believe today, with the explosion of insecurity and immigration, that one can be Minister of the Interior and hold the position of Minister of the Interior while also holding other positions? It's not like 20 years ago, like 30 years ago, everything has changed (...) who can believe at this moment that the Minister of the Interior has the free mind to take care of anything other than the gigantic task he has to carry out?" the candidate continues to wonder.

Laurent Wauquiez believes that "everyone must fulfill their role and their mission," not failing to criticize the recent incidents of insecurity that have occurred in recent weeks while Bruno Retailleau is a tenant of Beauvau.

"We're talking about France, we're not talking about Bolivia. We're not talking about Mexico, we're talking about France. In Saint-Ouen, you have a school that was next to a drug dealing point, what are we closing? The school. But 20 years ago, when Nicolas Sarkozy was Minister of the Interior, it would never have been possible to close a school to allow a drug dealing point to exist," he denounces.

"We're shooting at prisons with Kalashnikovs. We're kidnapping people in the street as if we were in Bogota, and we're crushing firefighters in Evian," he continues.

The man who claims to have "done everything to avoid" this campaign against Bruno Retailleau is proposing a "duo" to the latter: "when I win the election I will propose to Bruno Retailleau to be vice-president."

The Minister of the Interior had arranged to meet in Nîmes. Bruno Retailleau, in an interview with BFMTV after his meeting, said he "doesn't know what will happen on Sunday" but "enjoyed" campaigning.

"I never uttered the slightest sentence, the slightest criticism, until this evening, that is to say, until the last meeting," the candidate emphasizes. "I found activists who were finding hope in their political family, in the values ​​of the right."

"What I did with the members, tomorrow I want to do with the voters," he concluded on BFMTV.

The results of the internal election for the presidency of LR, in which some 120,000 members can vote, will be announced this Sunday evening.