What if we defined macronism? It’s been the quest for the Grail since 2017, or maybe a sea serpent. But the idea has been back in vogue in recent months and weeks. Emmanuel Macron, told L’Express, was thinking about a way to give words to a thought, or an action, or a course of action, who really knows? There was even someone, at the Elysée, who only had the word “legacy” on his lips – political heritage. This advisor, Frédéric Michel, is leaving, it is obviously a coincidence.
There is no chance, there are only meetings, said Paul Eluard. Missed appointments? Here is Emmanuel Macron caught up in the blind spot of his policy, immigration. This Tuesday, December 19, in a group meeting, we heard voices talking about “clearly the end of macronism”, we heard a Prime Minister, Elisabeth Borne, forced to step up to the plate by emphasizing that she is “fighting so that we do not lose our anchors” and that it “watches over the values of historical macronism”.
Lost effort: the executive has lost the most important battle in politics, that of semantics. Fueled by the National Rally on one side, the Nupes on the other, fatal pincers, it moved to the terrain of “national priority”. The totem of the far right at the center of the debates is too much for the majority, who have long believed that there is a happy medium also when it comes to immigration. She had learned nothing from the lessons of the past: already the Collomb bill, which in 2018 wanted to combine firmness and humanity, had turned into a fiasco and was close to breaking up the group. This time, the text had to reconcile expulsions and integration – it therefore leads to the question of “national preference”. “If it is of a technical or parametric nature, it can be looked at; if it is the questioning of fundamental principles, it is a very big problem”, warned a minister Tuesday morning, in the latest straight line of the joint committee.
By announcing her support for the text, Marine Le Pen knew what she was doing. Immediately, for the majority, it was a massacre. Do we remember the main concern of the president of the Renaissance group in the National Assembly, Sylvain Maillard, as the examination of the text approaches? Above all, avoid divisions. Result: the president of the Laws Committee, Sacha Houlié, votes against the text resulting from the CMP which he chaired. Others follow, historical figures, neophytes, while ministers let rumors of their resignation spread. Later, it was an important figure of Macronie, Philippe Grangeon, who expressed his “sadness”, considering that the text “turns its back on the doctrinal software of 2017 and on humanist values”, excuse me.
The kiss of death of the RN
The Macronists no longer have a compass. For a long time they looked elsewhere, or covered their ears. “Welcome less, but welcome better,” Emmanuel Macron asked in Le Figaro in 2021. “We must significantly reduce immigration, starting with illegal immigration,” he insisted in Point from August 24. They preferred to remember the happy times of the first campaign, illustrated by the meeting in Montpellier, “a welcoming city”.
For a time, they clung to one last hope. Immigration, a tough time to go through, before returning to the favorite subjects. It was not understanding that the world had changed, with its new challenges and its new perils, and that the president, their president, had also changed.
Until the denial? April 24, 2022. Celebrating his victory against Marine Le Pen, Emmanuel Macron said: “I know that many compatriots voted for me not to support the ideas that I hold, but to block those of the extreme right.” “This vote obliges me,” he said. No one understood, no one predicted that he would be forced to accept, eighteen months later, the kiss of death from the National Rally candidate.