In the small world of political communicators, there is a fable: the best among them would be a… screenwriter. Fascinated by the “Netflixization of politics“, a fairly trendy concept carried by the essayist Raphaël Llorca, a new generation of “engineers of chaos” has been carried away. Everyone has taken themselves for Baron Noir (Machiavelli, it’s his 16th century…) and is there went from its decryption House of Cards style in an initiated Newspeak: “And there, cliffhangernew sequence, the spin doctor causes a psychic coup…”. Welcome to the flattering world of post-rationalization.
Could we be further wrong? There Netflixization is a bad concept for a bad policy, an intellectual exercise far removed from strategic or operational reality – because the screenwriter, deus ex typewriterplays with characters whose fictional destiny he alone controls when the strategist – who must remain the politician – deals with the moving reality and the unfathomable reality.
And it was quite burlesque to see last April the Jean Jaurès Foundation mobilize the ranks of political experts for a dedicated analysis of the series Fever, without any of these eminences questioning the obsolete framework of this “pop-cultural object”, inscribed in this Mitterrandian political structure which is shattering before our eyes. With your feet in the humus, it is very difficult to study this biotope which nourishes you. In truth, in this laboratory experiment, brilliant as it is, isn’t the Jean Jaurès Foundation dissecting an insect to explain it to us without having watched it fly? This would be laughable if it didn’t lead us into such an… expected situation.
We know that in this media economy of attention, to win the cognitive war, the battle of algorithms, we must provoke astonishment to saturate public space. A “dropping of a grenade”, as our President had fun on a memorial trip to Oradour-sur-Glane. After “The Candidat”, an indispensable egocentric format for the 2022 campaign, Emmanuel Macron has therefore purchased the new series in which he would be the hero: “La Dissolution”. Should politics be delegated to the screenwriters?
Everyone will have to take back the place they should never have left
No matter how good a “sequence” is, it cannot fix a bad strategy. In this case, this ambitious “series” came to collide with an out-of-date Mitterrandian strategy, which wanted the left, since SOS Racisme and Touche pas à mon pote, to approve the scope of possible alliances on the right. Set to music by the communicator Jacques Pilhan, from a distance because “otherwise you become a courtier” (wise precept), this strategy made it possible to spur any majority inclination to the right by excluding from the “republican arc” a growing part of its electorate, deliberately upsetting the balance of power. We know the rest: real-false alternations driven by public policies where commonality prevails over differences. And since May 1981, there have been no great evenings or great hopes…
But that was before. With the dissolution, Emmanuel Macron wanted clarification? He didn’t think he was saying that well. As Camus asserted: “To misname things is to add to the misfortunes of the world…” Here is the entire Mitterrandian strategic edifice and its narrative which is faltering. Words regain their meaning, facts their importance; tectonic movement, new order… At the big label ball, everything flies and the masks fall. The king is naked, the courtiers unvarnished, the human comedy revealed. Everyone will have to take back the place they should never have left: for politics, strategy, reality and great History, for communicators, at a distance, the story and its orchestration. Because, I wouldn’t want you spoiler – reality always surpasses fiction.
* Pierre Vallet is a specialist in digital communication and crisis communication. He is CEO and co-founder of Reputation Age, a strategic sovereignty consulting agency. Latest collaborative work: Re-enchanting the Internet – 15 years after web 2.0, how to build the truth in the age of social networks.