Marine Le Pen gathers momentum before striking a blow with a machete on the sugar cane. On January 18, 2023, the leader of the National Rally is in Senegal, visiting a farm. The trip has been planned for months, thought of as a way to establish the international stature of the already three-time presidential candidate. But the images remain confidential. Just like his interview with President Macky Sall, who demanded that this meeting do without photographers.
4,000 kilometers away, the French, wrapped up in the cold of winter, have their minds set on more concrete concerns; they reflect on the organization of the next day’s strike. How to do without school, without metro, without train? On January 19, far from Dakar, the first demonstration against the pension reform reached an unprecedented scale: between one and two million citizens took to the streets, in Paris, but also in medium and small towns. Aerial images of multicolored processions saturate the editions of the 8 p.m. newspapers. Even the police figures are formal: the French had not been so numerous to demonstrate for twelve years.
Within the majority, no one can predict on which side social anger will fall. “The best way to go straight to extremes is not to solve the problems”, evacuates Minister Stanislas Guerini. But everyone knows that the government will leave feathers there. Nupes, united behind the unions, hopes to pocket the bet by reactivating the old right-left divide. Marine Le Pen, confident in her costume as the first opponent to Emmanuel Macron, sees herself as the natural receptacle of the movement. In the entourage of the Head of State, whose two five-year terms would be instantly demonetized if the daughter of Jean-Marie Le Pen came to power, we are concerned: “The president saw himself as a bulwark; he, finally, the stepping stone of the far right?” Whispered a visitor to the tenant of the Elysée in early January.
Toggle the “just above”
The Lepenist executives answer in the affirmative. “The protest against the pension reform is a pivotal, founding moment, which will have a significant impact on the 2027 election”, assures Thomas Ménagé, RN deputy for Loiret. Marine Le Pen chose this young man with a smooth course and controlled speech, who beat Jean-Michel Blanquer in the legislative elections, to lead the party’s response to this issue. A complicated exercise: the executives of the RN do not participate in the parades, as much by desire not to be associated with possible excesses as by necessity. “I would have liked to go to the demonstration, but I was made to understand that I was going to get my ass kicked,” sighs MP Pierre Meurin, in reference to the remarks of the union leaders, who recalled that the elected RN n were not welcome. The far right has never been comfortable with union culture, preferring bloodshed Boulangers – yellow vests or angry traders – to general strikes.
Failing to survey the asphalt, the marinist campaign against pensions is played out in the media and in parliament. The populist formation can count on a widely decried reform to accentuate the image of ruling elites cut off from the realities of the people. “Marine Le Pen is taking advantage of this reform, perceived by many French people as unfair and imposed from Paris, to surf on a feeling of incomprehension”, underlines Antoine Foucher, president of Quintet Conseil and former chief of staff of Muriel Pénicaud. This ground is all the more fertile in that the marinist electorate – made up mostly of working-class and middle-class workers, often in rural and outlying areas – feels particularly threatened by the reform. “The risk is to quickly tip the “just above”, who do not yet vote for Marine Le Pen. The workers and the less qualified make up the reservoir of votes for the RN, its breeding ground for growth”, analyzes the political scientist Bruno Landing. According to the researcher at Sciences Po, forcing the losers of globalization to work longer can only stir up the social anger that feeds the RN. He cites the Italian example: the very unpopular Fornero pension reform, adopted at the end of 2011, according to him, allowed the accession to power of the far-right (Lega) and populist (5-star Movement) formations, seven years later.
In this battle, Marine Le Pen intends to give of her person, but while remaining comfortably seated on the far right of the hemicycle, where she has chaired a group of 87 deputies since the legislative elections of June 2022. Jean-Marie’s daughter Le Pen has already launched a few spades, as when she declared, on January 11, that there is in Emmanuel Macron’s desire to lead the pension reform at this precise moment “a sadistic side of the kid who tears off his wings flies”. The former presidential candidate spoke to the Association of Parliamentary Journalists, in a room closed to the public under the gilding of the Bourbon Palace. During the debates, his speeches in the hemicycle will have to find a way to break through the media glass ceiling. “Who is watching LCP? No one cares what happens in the National Assembly, and no one will see what Marine Le Pen will say at 4 p.m., in the middle of the afternoon”, predicts the communicator Arnaud Stephan, old fellow traveler of the RN, skeptical of the strategy adopted. Within the party, we defend ourselves by invoking the concern to preserve a hard-won presidential stature. “Obviously, we will give the feeling of being less talked about than the left, which will be both in the hemicycle and in the street… We will be less seen, but we will be well seen!”, wants to believe Thomas Ménagé.
The concern of letting the far right win the day does not spare Macronie. “If we miss, we know it: next time, it’s for her”, repeat in chorus ministers and parliamentarians of the majority. During a Renaissance group meeting in January, the deputy for Paris and co-founder of the party, Astrid Panosyan-Bouvet, alerted her colleagues to this danger. “All public policies must be assessed in terms of the RN risk in four years, she warns. This reform may be felt as disproportionate for workers, employees, intermediate professions. We can witness a shift in middle classes.” The hypothesis is also taken seriously at Matignon. A few days before Christmas, Elisabeth Borne opened up in a small committee: “We can have a reaction from the RN electorate, that’s why I am very attentive, for example, to immediately provide an answer to employees who have a very hard life. Because it is the card that Marine Le Pen will play”, confided the Prime Minister.
A necessary evil
A fear all the more acute that a report is unanimously shared, at the time when began, Monday, January 30, the examination of the reform in the National Assembly: the battle of the opinion is lost. Never has the government, nor the presidential majority, nor even the President of the Republic, managed to find the right strategy, the right tone, to explain it to the French. This applies first and foremost to the heart of the project, the need to postpone the retirement age to 64 in order to preserve, according to the government, the pay-as-you-go system. “The reality is that this is not a reform of justice, but a reform to balance the system. Period. We have not managed to demonstrate – and this is our real problem – that it was a necessary evil”, admits the deputy Renaissance and president of the Commission of the laws of the Assembly Sacha Houlié.
If the government persists in attesting that the most modest workers will not be penalized more, a large part of Emmanuel Macron’s troops have, while keeping their heads held high, have given up. Whether she is 65 or 64, the age measure has taken over everything in its path. Leaving only the feeling that it is always the same ones from whom the efforts are asked. The pensions file also revives the original sin that sticks to the skin of macronism: that of a power that abandons France from the sub-prefectures. “What is worrying on the political level is that this reform will create a form of resentment among many French people, explains a minister. is unresponsive to concerns.”
Here is the executive forced to play an impossible score: having to carry out a parametric reform which he considers essential after having deemed it “hypocritical” three years ago “as long as we have not solved the problem of unemployment And to assume the political consequences Who remembers the 39-year-old young man, who declared in 2017 that he pledged to do “everything so that there is no longer any reason to vote for the extremes?” later, Marine Le Pen qualified again in the second round, winning two million six hundred and fifty thousand voters.For 2027, Jean-Marie Le Pen’s daughter is now in the lead, Emmanuel Macron not being able to run for a third consecutive five-year term.No one but her can now be assured of a qualification in the second round.
So as not to belie the president’s promise once again, his troops have no magic wand. At the Elysée, the strategists of Macronie are thinking about future projects. What project would be sufficiently consensual, impactful and intelligible, to patch up the break? From mid-January, the new boss of Renaissance Stéphane Séjourné called in Le Figaro to reform the institutions following the retreats. Proportional, easier recourse to the shared initiative referendum, legislative elections decorrelated from the presidential election… “One thing is certain, it is that distrust of institutions is very important: people say ‘you have betrayed'”, advances a pillar of the government, who remembers how much the claim was at the heart of the crisis of the yellow vests.
Fix up
To stem the rise of the RN in the longer term, Macronie is banking on full employment and the success of its economic policy, built on the diptych “reindustrialization” and “sovereignty”. “What will bring Le Pen down is that we are creating jobs, particularly industrial ones, from Charleville-Mézières to Dunkirk, from Millau to Montbéliard,” said Minister Delegate for Industry Roland Lescure. Forgetting a little quickly that the RN vote is explained as much by identity anxieties and a feeling of abandonment as by economic contingencies.
“After a complicated reform, we have to mend, that’s for sure, and we have our responsibility. We will have three years left, slips a minister. But I’m not sure that the best way to beat the far right is to do pass a bill on immigration mainly focused on the sovereign and the security…” A reference to the bill expected in the spring in the National Assembly, which promises to be just as perilous for the government, wedged between the right and ‘it will be necessary to satisfy to obtain its votes, and an uncomfortable left wing on the regalian. An episode from which Marine Le Pen hopes to emerge a winner, again.
“The best way to prevent it from benefiting the RN is to stop spreading this kind of self-fulfilling prophecy. Let those who say that focus instead on the reform itself”, stings the Minister of Labor Olivier Dussopt, tired of counting the Cassandres in his own camp. The most optimistic are reassured. Once adopted, which credible presidential candidate will be able to assume to reconsider a reform which should make it possible to save more than 10 billion euros by 2030? Even Marine Le Pen could no longer take a step back without losing a few points of credibility. A slim hope of succeeding in turning the trap of a cursed reform.