The Head of State will be back in Paris on Sunday evening, while the appointment of a new Prime Minister, followed by that of the government, is expected from Monday, three weeks already after his re-election.

While several names are circulating for the one, or especially the one, who will succeed Jean Castex, Emmanuel Macron paid tribute to the President of the United Arab Emirates, Sheikh Khalifa ben Zayed Al-Nahyan, who died on Friday. And will receive Monday at lunch the President of the European Council Charles Michel.

This unexpected trip forced the Prime Minister to give up his planned trip to the Vatican, replaced by Gérald Darmanin, the Minister of the Interior, for the canonization of the explorer and then hermit Charles de Foucauld, the two chief executives who may be outside the territory at the same time.

Sign of a certain feverishness? The government website had mistakenly posted a page on Saturday morning announcing the resignation of the Castex government, “due to technical problems”, said Matignon.

– “Do not seal the message” –

“This soap opera from the succession of Jean Castex never ends”, points out political scientist Bruno Cautrès (Cevipof), who finds this delay “very astonishing”.

“Perhaps it’s also a tactic of the head of state, just to gradually prepare public opinion for a new cast”, advances Franceinfo the director of research at the CNRS.

According to him, there is also “the idea of ​​not stopping the message that will be sent by the new cast because, in a few weeks, the new government or new ministers have time to make decisions, to make statements that are not necessarily pleasing”.

It is thus a question of “allowing the new government not to be immediately overexposed” before the decisive legislative elections of June 12 and 19, he summarizes.

The head of the Modem, François Bayrou, an ally of Emmanuel Macron, justified him on Sunday to the Grand Jury RTL-LCI-Le Figaro: “It is not useless to have a period to put things in order and think about a new team”.

Claiming not to know the name of the future head of government, he supported the idea that it was a woman, as relatives of Emmanuel Macron have suggested.

Edith Cresson, the only one to have occupied the post of Prime Minister from May 1991 to April 1992, during François Mitterrand’s second seven-year term, wishes him in advance “a lot of courage” and “castigates the “machismo of the French political class”, in an interview with the JDD.

– The Vautrin track? –

“It is not the country that is macho: it is its political class. These are the same attacks as today. we were commenting on my dress, “says the former socialist leader.

After those of the Minister of Labor Elisabeth Borne or Véronique Bédague, former director of cabinet of the Prime Minister Manuel Valls who became CEO of the real estate group Nexity, the name which returns insistently on Sunday to succeed him is that of Catherine Vautrin, former Minister of the Social Cohesion of Jacques Chirac, who had supported Emmanuel Macron before the 1st round.

“She has a lot of experience and works hard on her files, she has both moderate and very solid convictions, she loves people and has a deeply humanist background: three character traits that are not so often found in policy”, pleads a local elected official close to the president of the urban community of Grand Reims.

“She is undoubtedly a woman of quality” but “is she ready to renounce all the ideas that she has defended for so long” by taking “this additional step to apply a policy which would be completely contrary to what that she defended for years?” Criticized MEP LR Nadine Morano on Europe 1.

In the midst of all this speculation, we would almost forget that the legislative campaign has already started and is continuing this weekend quietly, in the Var for the now candidate Eric Zemmour as in the 576 other constituencies.

On Saturday, the former environmental candidate Yannick Jadot came discreetly to support a market for EELV spokesperson Eva Sas, candidate in the 8th district in Paris.

And the Communist Party officially invested 50 candidates on Saturday, including its leader and former presidential candidate Fabien Roussel (North), after the agreement reached with the rebellious in the new alliance on the left.