During Emmanuel Macron’s first five-year term, there is a little music that malevolent beings often sang: “If he had neither Prime Minister nor ministers, he would be the happiest of men.” Solitary, authoritarian, Jupiter… many qualities were attributed to the young president, one of which – the best shared by political leaders who have reached the heights – has no reason to have weakened with his re-election: an absolute faith in him- even. A faith, of such magnitude, that it provokes in a familiar of the first Macronian circle this exasperation: “We confusedly underestimate the confidence he has in him!” Would the president take himself for Saint-Just? “I despise this dust which composes me and which speaks to you: we can persecute it and make this dust die!
Emmanuel Macron conquered power with cries of “disruption” and “revolution”, he proved that even an unexpected crisis, even a spectacular one, he knew how to get up, his self-confidence not shaken but on the contrary revived by his ability to turn an overwhelming situation in its favour. Why would he feel gripped by doubt? Of course, as soon as her second term began, annoying people pointed the finger at Marine Le Pen’s high score, the colossal abstention, but it would be enough to wrap the hesitant, the disappointed, the anti included, in a new method of fluffy and reassuring government. “With you,” he promised then. “With you”, he repeated as if these two little words were worth recanting. Macronism is getting a makeover and this disjointed France would find in this re-elected president a man of conviction, of course, but also of dialogue, capable of listening to the ills of the French and responding to them with his weighed words.
But first: thing promised, thing due. The pension reform, an announcement warmed up from the 2017 and then 2022 campaign, must inaugurate the five-year term, order of the chief. Here in Macronie, we are deploying to praise the merits of the postponed departure age and the increased duration of contributions. One hardly dares, when one is a high-ranking minister, to question the relevance of the moment. So, when the first worried, within his own majority, splash him with their remarks on “the lack of pedagogy” and other nonsense invented to destabilize him, the head of state widens his eyes.
Convinced that this mandate must be that of the president in overhang, busier abroad than in the Assembly, he left his ministers and the First among them to get by with approximate announcements and a speech more accounting than mobilizing . He did not see the growing sense of injustice and misunderstanding coming. How many members of the government a few weeks before 49.3 pranced: “The reform is already behind us, we must move on.” Minimal analysis error. “There was a presentation problem, deplores a former Elysian adviser. They should have said ‘Yes, we ask you to work until you are 64, it’s not easy but it’s to support a system of progress, justice, a generous regime’, instead, language such as ‘avoid financial degradation’ was stammered, it’s a bit rude.” And the unifying presidential speech was never delivered.
However, when, a few days before the final vote in the Assembly, Emmanuel Macron surveyed his people, group bosses, party leaders, almost all assured him that no deputy would be missed. The number of Republicans in favor of the text, too uncertain, certainly transformed the vote into a demonstration of audacity, but doesn’t the president have a natural tendency to take risks? Many around him were dumbfounded by this choice of 49.3. So little Macronian. But so Macronian if we consider that his overconfidence goes hand in hand with a form of disaffection for parliamentarians. We do not leave the mother of reforms in their clumsy, unthinkable hands. Why don’t they understand? Maybe they weren’t explained well… Late awareness. But to incriminate the softness of a minister, the too great capacity to yield of another, when it comes to people who have been appointed… “I should have done it myself” is a a thought that has undoubtedly crossed the head of state’s mind lately. Instead, the pension reform has gone neither “with you” nor “with him”. Self-confidence does not exclude commitment.