Interview with Emmanuel Macron: a skin-less president

Interview with Emmanuel Macron a skin less president

“The circle of your days, represented by this Skin, will tighten according to the strength and the number of your wishes, from the lightest to the most exorbitant”: Balzac’s hero, the young Raphaël of Valentin, would never have had to push the door of the old antique shop. The harder his fall will be. There is also a fatality of second presidential terms. What was already not easy for François Mitterrand or Jacques Chirac is even less so for Emmanuel Macron, at a time when political and media wear and tear are multiplied.

The current Head of State knows this, he is aware of this risk of getting bogged down. “We learn from the mistakes of our predecessors, observes an adviser. The best way to fight against getting bogged down is movement.” The presidential interview on TF1 and France 2, this Wednesday, March 22, had this object: to drown under the avalanche of construction sites mentioned the impression, or the risk, of the immobility that the abandonment nevertheless points to, in its current state. , of the bill on immigration, prepared for a long time by the Minister of the Interior Gérald Darmanin.

But the passage of time reduces the field of possibilities, even for a president – ​​especially, nowadays, for a president. Emmanuel Macron did the trick of act 2, presenting, during a press conference on April 25, 2019, at the end of the yellow vests crisis, “the new method that I want: the human being put back in the heart of the project”. He personalized the promise of change: “Let’s be able to reinvent ourselves, me first”, that was in 2020. So many cartridges already used.

With the second five-year term, the hourglass is emptying more and more quickly. In June 2022, after disappointing legislative elections for him, he solemnly announced: “Yes, to act in your interest and in that of the nation, we must collectively learn to govern and legislate differently.” During these first weeks of this mandate, he titillates the idea of ​​a “coalition”, now he is obliged to cast off. This Wednesday noon, he finds that it is “hard to build coalitions”: “We tried at the start of the five-year term, it was not done”. Here he is reduced to showing “esteem and respect for many parliamentarians” and recommending instead to solicit “political individuals who are ready to work with the forces of the majority”. To Elisabeth Borne, who has never believed, any more today than yesterday, in the possibility of building a government coalition, of “expanding this majority as much as possible with women and men of good will, who on the right, on the left or on the side of ecology, are ready to move forward with it”. We are closer to debauchery than to overcoming…

The next step, no doubt, will point to the loneliness of the president, curled up in the circle of his last followers. “We are not in competition on taking responsibility”, noted with his humor at Audiard Emmanuel Macron.

Will he end up, horresco referens, as president of the old world? “Fewer legal texts, but shorter, clearer texts”, promises Emmanuel Macron. Those who have already said the same thing are long dead. He now pays homage to the senatorial majority, often singled out during the first five-year term, it would no longer be missing that the name of Gérard Larcher circulates for Matignon – this has been the case for a few days!

The country does not help him as he seems tired. “The difficulty of the ‘whatever the cost’ of the Covid period is that it has made us lose the grammar of reform”, advances a relative. Some traveling companions of Emmanuel Macron – opposed in this to the guardian of the temple of 2017, the secretary general of the Elysée Palace Alexis Kohler – ask that the nation be allowed to breathe. From this diversity of influences comes perhaps the formula of Emmanuel Macron in his television interview: “Build an ambitious and soothing government program.” We have the impression that an oxymoron has slipped into the remarks of the head of state. A reform that would be at the same time, as someone would say, ambitious and soothing, does it really exist in these times of abyssal debt?

It is not this Wednesday that the president, we will have guessed it, wanted to regain control, he did not have the means. He was just trying to save time. But when he chooses to actually launch a new offensive and turns around to see who is ready to accompany him, how many will still be there to respond?

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