It was a little sentence dropped on the sidelines of the November 11 ceremonies which, it must be admitted, caused people to jump. “My role, explained Emmanuel Macron, is to build the unity of the country, and to be clear on the values, I am. My role is to make decisions, to say words when they need to be said and to “act. Otherwise I can demonstrate every week.” The president, who has “never been to a demonstration of any kind”, chose not to be in the street this Sunday, and his choice may give rise to incomprehension, as if his presence would have been contrary to the quest for national unity which is among the first duties of the head of state, especially in the current period.
However, this Sunday, it was not a march like there could be “every week”, it was even the opposite: it had an exceptional as well as solemn character, which the presidential formula seems to ignore. May his approach be validated by the other major absentee, Jean-Luc Mélenchon – “Macron is right. This so-called march against anti-Semitism at the call of Meyer Habib, Le Pen, Zemmour, Braun-Pivet and Larcher is working like manipulation. Like him and me, don’t let yourself be fooled” – reinforces the uneasiness. The leader of LFI has strayed too far from Republican values in recent weeks for it to be possible to find ourselves, one way or another, on the same side as him.
The incomprehension aroused by Emmanuel Macron’s attitude and comments also comes from the fact that the president, in an interview with the BBC broadcast on Friday evening, seemed to move away from his initial position. He “urges Israel to stop” the bombings that are killing civilians in Gaza and adds: “De facto, today, civilians are being bombed. These babies, these women, these elderly people are being bombed and killed.” There is no “no justification” And “no legitimacy to that”.
In current historical circumstances, zigzag is not an option. “There is no “yes but””: it is Emmanuel Macron himself who clarifies this in his letter to the French published this Sunday by The Parisian and it’s happy. Writing has the virtue of preventing poorly controlled formulas. Did the president want to correct himself? To his Israeli counterpart Isaac Herzog, with whom he spoke by telephone, he indicated “unequivocally supporting the State of Israel and [son] right to self-defense”. The clarification is welcome: being the guarantor of national unity means less than ever being in the “at the same time”.