Bill Murray’s impatient fist lands once, twice, three times on that pesky clock radio struggling to play I got you babe at 6 a.m. displaying the same date as the day before. Every morning, the same morning. The image, thus transformed into a GIF, and taken from the cult film an endless day in which a weather presenter relives the day of February 2 indefinitely, is sent to us by someone close to the president, aware that the series of the reshuffle has lasted too long.
But what redesign are we talking about? Emmanuel Macron has a gift: stretching time when the idea of turning the government upside down comes to him. Anxious to show that he decides, does not feel pressured by either his ministers or the press, he almost seems to enjoy transforming into infinite expectation a moment which, before him, had a strong symbolic content because instantaneous or almost. Maybe yesterday, maybe tomorrow, macronism is an apprenticeship in patience.
Yesterday, a reshuffle served to “reconnect” a softened five-year or seven-year term. He carried within him promises of renewal of ministers and adjustment of political line. We modified, we injected a little electricity and now the government engine was supposed to restart, more humming than before. How not to think that now it is quite the opposite? Living in the anguish of being replaced, the ministers evolve “in low tension”, in the words of a former ministerial adviser, for long weeks. Reduced action, non-existent risk-taking, stifled speech, and if a nonsense condemned them? Some ministers have fun adding up the days spent waiting to be determined on their fate since the start of the second five-year term. Endless suspense before the departure of Jean Castex, unbearable suspense after the legislative elections, eternal post-pension reform suspense, tiresome suspense after the “hundred days”… And how long for the action and “reforming audacity” promised in 2017?
Rhetorical question, does Emmanuel Macron believe in the influence and political weight of his ministers? Eternal criticism to which he responds when he does not hesitate to swap a right-wing prime minister, elected from the field (Catherine Vautrin) for a left-wing, techno-first minister (Elisabeth Borne) at the last minute. The optimists rave about the agility of the Head of State; the most lucid understand that, even at Matignon, we decide so little… Under these conditions, what about the probable arrival of Gabriel Attal at National Education, a year after the appointment of Pap Ndiaye in place of Jean-Michel Blanquer: real change of course, or simple change of name in a team where neither heads nor ideas go beyond?
Here we are in an ubiquitous situation where the media wait, serialize and comment on a political moment that the president has emptied of its substance and its interest, leaving public opinion increasingly indifferent to what no longer has anything of an upheaval. Apart from the journalists, who are still tapping on their alarm clock, impatient to see what happens next, in a period of reorganization?