Emmanuel Macron, president of “obligatory exercises”

Pensions the spirit of reform has completely frozen in France

There are several kinds of tomorrows. Those who sing, but this Tuesday certainly does not look like it. Those who annoy; this one comes close to it, but that would be giving it too much consideration. And those who purr, look like the day before, the day before, and so on, coated in an expected blandness. It is against this general feeling that the members of the government, sent early this Tuesday morning to the sets to provide after-sales service for Emmanuel Macron’s speech, had to fight, aware that the President of the Republic has at least frustrated, if not disappointed.

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It couldn’t be otherwise, it seems. “It was a compulsory exercise, it was not missed but it could not have been better”, was content to recognize a leading minister a few minutes after this address to the French. Or: the exact antithesis of what Emmanuel Macron is, as much the man as what he represents politically.

Who are you, and what have you done with the “master of the clocks”? The Head of State would therefore have resigned himself to practicing this exercise that could not be more solemn, in the moment of political crisis that we know, almost constrained and forced, knowing full well that it would not be up to expectations. . It should still work…

“We are trying to gain some time to calm things down,” said another member of the government. Wasn’t this already characteristic of the March 22 interview, with the result that we know? Nothing is less like Emmanuel Macron – remember, the one who wanted to de-sclerosis good old politics, change the rules, do otherwise – than act, or worse, in this case speak, by default, pressurized by contingencies , he who impressed his interlocutors with his ability to tame them.

In “one hundred days” – there are still this Tuesday 88 exactly – he will return to the French to draw “a first” assessment. This communication device, this “tree that hides the forest” as we wrote on Monday evening, is just as eloquent and symbolic: what exercise is more obligatory than the traditional July 14 interview? The very one that Emmanuel Macron did not want to hear about at the start of his first five-year term. What is left for macronism if it is cut off from its risk-taking? A long time ago, the president said he wanted to reinvent himself. Perhaps he really did, by lowering his demands on himself. Basically, is the gap so big between a president of compulsory exercises and a president in the process of being chiraquized?

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