The practice was thought to have been abandoned due to being discouraged. In the textbooks, this is called “management by fear” and it belongs to another time. Today, the manager must be a leader, one who helps his employees find their maximum potential. Quite the opposite of the “despot manager [qui] takes pleasure in destabilizing the other”, writes Chantal Vander Vorst, co-author with Patrick Collignon of the book toxic management.
Emmanuel Macron is the youngest president of the Fifth Republic and yet he likes nothing more than to destabilize those who work under his orders. The Council of Ministers brings together all those who dream of Matignon and are only waiting for a sign to feel their wings grow. The closed session is obviously artificial, no one imagines for a single moment that political leaders would keep for themselves a little presidential nastyness which weakens the one or the one they dream of knocking out.
And it is this enclosure, the worst of all, as we have understood, that the president chose on Tuesday May 30 to criticize the words of Elisabeth Borne on the RN “heir” of Pétain, when he was preparing to lunch in stride with his Prime Minister. Wasn’t this the opportunity to reframe it as much as he wanted, far from any treacherous ears – we won’t come back here to the substance of the debate, the best way to fight the far right?
“Put more pressure in the tube”
Emmanuel Macron likes the expression “put more pressure in the tube”. In 2018, the Minister of the Interior, Gérard Collomb, and the Minister of Justice, Nicole Belloubet, differed on the figures of “returnists”, these individuals who left for Syria or Iraq and returned to France. “Verify this for me within 48 hours,” says the president.
Another day, while Christophe Castaner was taking his first steps in Beauvau, the Head of State summoned him: “You solve the problem of Albania and Georgia within 15 days and we take stock” – these are the first two countries in terms of asylum applications.
As soon as you sit quietly in your chair, you become less good. This is his big theory. On the evening of the bad municipal elections for the majority, in June 2020, Emmanuel Macron launches in a small committee: “We have become gentrified and it’s never good to become gentrified, it prevents us from shaking up the system.” But between keeping people under tension and destabilizing them, therefore weakening them, the margin can be narrow. In the middle of the hundred days, the president therefore acted in such a way as to relaunch speculation on the fate of Elisabeth Borne. In other words, he soaped her board. 24 hours later, he felt obliged to assure that the Prime Minister had all his “confidence”…
Find the editorials of our Political department every evening in our political newsletter at 9 p.m., by clicking here.