A presidential videoconference interview in telework, on Zoom, with the faces of the interviewers and the interviewee crushed in the television set; and a sound shift between Paris and Nouméa – where Emmanuel Macron had just landed – which adds to the comedy of the situation. A presidential interview like a little “hello, everything is going well here with Gérald and the children having fun” scratched on a postcard. Cursed compulsory exercise of the holidays. The interview over and the television off, a question then twirls in the air: what did Emmanuel Macron want to tell us?
On April 17, the Head of State made an appointment to better turn the page on the so painful pension reform, adopted by 49.3, so much did it shake up the majority and stir up the sad passions of the opposition and the anger of the street. “Next July 14 should allow us to make an initial assessment. We have before us a hundred days of appeasement, unity, ambitions and actions in the service of France”, promised Emmanuel Macron. We said to ourselves that the government’s time was running out, that of Elisabeth Borne above all. That he would hold the great speech of his second five-year term, the one he had not delivered on the evening of his re-election, as a political chin blow to avoid the Chiraquian pallor that can strike a second term.
In what galley has the head of state embarked, if not his own? Elisabeth Borne ultimately stayed, the reshuffle was just a series of tweaks, where a few loyal ones were promoted. He justified “the choice of trust”, but for lack of thrushes we eat blackbirds. The last time, during the same exercise at 1 p.m. for the two major national channels, this time under the high ceiling of the Élysée, he set priorities: work, school, health, safety, ecology. Four months later, he hammers these same sites, safety above all this time, a month after urban violence caused by the death of Nahel. “Order, order, order”, he repeated, and “prevention” too. What his Ministers of the Interior and of Justice, Gérald Darmanin and Éric Dupond-Moretti, were already striving to say.
What to say ?
What could have been “act 2 of the quinquennium 2” was only a leap of obstacles. Emmanuel Macron preferred to span the “hundred days”, and the balance sheet that went with it, limiting the announcements and multiplying the satisfaction. “We have not been idle!”, He tries to convince: the inflation of the texts adopted – “more than 5 years ago”, he swears -, the good management of the fires after those, gigantic and dramatic, last summer. The Head of State wants to move on, and does not hide it. Everything is better then, and if this is not quite the case yet, then everything will be better with “the several billion more euros” that will be invested to achieve the objectives of decarbonization in 2030 and carbon neutrality in 2050.
With so many details, so many “caps”, “construction sites”, “priorities” and other sometimes detailed desires, Emmanuel Macron seemed to have donned, on July 24, the costume of Prime Minister, of which Élisabeth Borne would be the new Deputy Prime Minister. Three days ago, he was already speaking at the opening of the Council of Ministers, the day after the reshuffle, to pull up the suspenders of the members of the government. Where is President Macron? And by dint of talking, does he still have something to tell us?