Pensions: between Macron and the street, the untraceable justice of the peace of French democracy

Pension reform the governments strategy in the face of mobilization

What is an election for? The so-called government parties, yesterday LR, today the PS, are zealously breaking this tool, incapable as they are of deciding by ballot a question about their organization. What is a presidential election for? In 2022, the campaign is reduced to a trickle. In the first round, Emmanuel Macron came out on top: he collected 1,126,712 more votes than five years earlier, when there were fewer voters than in 2017. But in the second round, he was still the receptacle of anti -The pen. “Many of our compatriots voted for me today, not to support the ideas I hold but to block those of the far right,” he said on the evening of his victory. What are legislative elections for? Those of June 2022 do not generate an absolute majority, even if the camp of the president has the most deputies. We will end up believing that indeed, elections, trap to c…

Because from there, what to do? Where does the legitimacy of acting in this five-year term begin, where does it end? The movement of 1995, which the left cites as an example, was explained because Jacques Chirac was in power the opposite of what the French had heard during his campaign (the social fracture). That of 2023 is based on the contestation of a project presented by the candidate but which the voters supporting personalities eliminated in the first round and rallying in the second round to the future winner reject.

Social anger is there, obviously. But renouncing to act in the field of pensions on the pretext that it would benefit Marine Le Pen is to consider that she has already won, if not at the polls, at least in people’s minds. The problem is different, it is that the government has had a series of disappointments since the presentation of its text: it has not convinced of the need for reform; the justice of the proposed measures is not obvious. It is, above all, that no longer manages to constitute itself, and to be heard, “civic opinion”, according to the formula of François Bayrou. French democracy is looking for its justice of the peace and cannot find it.

From resentment to betrayal, there is only one step. A hole. What are the institutions that engender such a disaster worth? Renovating them would be a fine presidential project, which Emmanuel Macron wants to open while ignoring whether he has the political strength. And the legitimacy to launch it, does he have it or not?

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