He unambiguously supported Emmanuel Macron when he was elected President of the Republic. The harder the fall will be. Today, Alain Minc is not angry with the dissolution, which installs the National Rally as the first party in France. And which casts a shadow over the entire Macronian adventure: “As in Shakespearean dramas, the end erases the rest.”
L’Express: “It won’t be anyone’s fault on the evening of the second round. It will be the responsibility of the French people,” said Emmanuel Macron even before the first round. Is the president responsible for what the voters vote for?
Alain Minc: This is a shameful sentence, yes, shameful. We are already in the psychological process that will allow Emmanuel Macron to exonerate himself from all responsibility. He created the conditions for the disaster, he is responsible for it. He could have tried to make people forget the result of the European elections and there, he succeeded in the feat of making it set in stone definitively. We would have ended up forgetting the victory of the RN on June 9, he has now made it the interclass and intergenerational party like the RPR and the PS were.
How do you explain that a president who seemed to embody a form of reason decided on this dissolution?
When a man who is supposed to be intelligent and who is, makes a decision of absolute stupidity, it is because the psychological dimension has taken precedence over reflection and reason. Emmanuel Macron is, among the leaders of the last decades, the one for whom personal psychology is the most decisive. This dissolution is the result of a narcissism pushed to an almost pathological state, which leads to the denial of reality. How can one imagine going from 250 to 280 deputies? No purely considered argument could justify such a decision, so we must look elsewhere for explanations.
When I said in 2022 that I would support Valérie Pécresse in the first round, I gave a reason: this job, which has no equivalent in the world, is such that at the end of a term, one is intellectually exhausted. Behavioral defects worsen, political capital withers, and what is related to reflection weakens. The only way to exercise this function sustainably is to do it in a royal manner, that is to say part-time like kings do. If you play golf on Monday morning and spend an hour in bookstores in the afternoon, like Mitterrand, you have a different approach to work. But when you do it like a super technocrat, you finish the term exhausted. We saw it in 2022, there was no more juice in the machine. Time also accentuates court phenomena, with the emergence of buffoons such as those who are said to have influenced the decision to dissolve. But while I readily believe that Emmanuel Macron laughs at the jokes of those Bruno Le Maire calls “woodlice”, I find it hard to believe that he lets himself be influenced: he has never listened to anyone.
What could the next legislature look like?
At best, it will be chaos, with an Assembly even more unmanageable than the previous one, but without the possibility of dissolving for a year. This is a situation made for Edgar Faure, not for Emmanuel Macron. A technical government on the Italian model would not be suitable for a country already dominated by its technocratic elites. Emmanuel Macron should therefore take a step back, focus on international issues and choose a veteran politician, with the aim of doing as little harm as possible: Jean-Pierre Raffarin, Bernard Cazeneuve, Jean-Yves Le Drian… However, we know what promises to retire to his Aventine are worth with him: they do not last even for the space of a morning.
At worst, we have an absolute majority for the RN. Until now, we have experienced cohabitation between old grugs, sharing the same system of values, within the same circle of reason. This time, it would be a cohabitation between two virgins. Emmanuel Macron has the experience but not the slightest know-how for this type of circumstance, Jordan Bardella let’s not talk about it. It takes a superego as thick as the perimeter wall of a nuclear power plant to handle such situations. However, Emmanuel Macron does not have a superego. I can’t believe this could last three years.
In 2017, you supported Emmanuel Macron. Does this episode of the dissolution cast a shadow over the entire Macronian adventure?
As in Shakespearean dramas, the end erases the rest. If the RN comes to power, this is what will remain of the Macronian adventure. Political life is like life: we judge it on the last step. Macron will be Napoleon III after Sedan. Here again, the psychological dimension resurfaces. For seven years he has been trying, with success, to make France business friendly and he has spent the last few years preparing for the Olympic Games in Paris. Now he commits a gesture which brings France back to its evil demons, arousing the distrust of the economic world, and he destroys his toy which is the Olympic Games.
There is no doubt about his intelligence, but other officials have it. What always struck me about him was his incredible audacity. It has transformed into a vision disconnected from reality. However, in this society of anomie, individualism creates populism. When civil society is robust, there are antibodies to individualism. When the individual finds himself alone with his ballot, in the middle of social networks, it is a triumphant path for populism. Here we are.
You might be suggested not to shoot an ambulance…
We could also say that in 2022, by not voting for Emmanuel Macron in the first round, despite the long-standing ties between us, I felt like I had predicted the ambulance’s route, right? There are some forgivable historical errors, but this one is not. During the 2005 referendum, I said about Laurent Fabius that he had committed the most shameful conscious political gesture since June 1940. Here, we are in a gesture of a completely different magnitude. We have spent the last few decades ensuring that France is no longer the pariah of the West, and we risk taking the path of an illiberal democracy, or an apathetic parliamentary regime. The fury that I feel, you can hear it in many others: all those who gave him a leg up are devastated.
Are you angry forever?
When everyone turns their backs on him, he will have to be taken care of.
Basically, you mainly blame Emmanuel Macron for having forced many voters to choose between the RN and the New Popular Front, right? What would you do yourself?
If the representative of the New Popular Front is a socialist, an ecologist or a commie, I obviously vote for him. If he is an Insoumis who has broken ranks, too. If he is a historical LFI channel, I vote blank.
Are you counting on Emmanuel Macron to be a pole of stability in the next three years, “a president who protects our Republic at every moment”, as he wrote?
I hope he will rise to the occasion, which requires restraint, skill, composure and perversity. These are four serious characteristics, which require a profound psychological shift in Emmanuel Macron.
Should he, will he resign?
Above all, he must not resign, today he cannot imagine it, that is certain, but will he have the strength to resist the erosion of a harsh cohabitation with the RN? I do not know. And if he resigns, every Republican will have to line up behind the most legitimate of Republican candidates, Gérard Larcher: interim president, with an election taking place three weeks later, he will be in the position.
Finally, what is Macronism in the light of History, or was it?
The primary source of Macronism is its visceral convictions about Europe. He has assets, yes. But the tragedy of what we are experiencing today, in the light of History, is that everything that was to its credit risks being swallowed up by the incredible political regression to which we are promised. France in the coming years will not undo Europe; but a Europe where the French engine is at a standstill, where German power is also, is a Europe which will not move forward. The moment we become unreasonable, the English will become reasonable, but they are no longer in the family.
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