An image has circulated widely on the digital agora: customers seated at the restaurant who finish their dinner, order a coffee, attack the main course. A banal scene of French life in Saint-Etienne, Monday March 20. With the difference that through the windows of the restaurant we can see burning garbage cans and scenes of urban riots that have become classic since the use of 49.3 by the government of Elisabeth Borne.
I know that has nothing to do with it, but this discrepancy between life which continues despite the fire made me think of May 9, 1940, the day of the German offensive, when a war correspondent said that the soldiers Belgians planted pansies around their barracks. And also: the streets of Paris were full of officers and soldiers whose leave had just been restored by General Gamelin, the Auteuil races were full, you had to queue to get a table in a restaurant, and the song I’ll wait was a success when the onlookers hummed under the flowering chestnut trees… This tragic sequence has nothing to do with the restaurant in Saint-Etienne on a riotous evening. The Third World War is not on the horizon, despite the tragedy in Ukraine, and no one is whistling in the streets of France, hands in their pockets dreaming of love and a bright future.
Exactly. Restaurant patrons who continue their dinner without a glare at the riot may think none the less – even they don’t seem to care at all in the immediate future. Since the protests began in January, all commentators have been wondering where so much resentment and frustration will end. According to the polls, on the far right. In view of the republican behavior of Marine Le Pen and her deputies in the National Assembly, who wait, almost in silence, to reap the fruits of Renaissance amateurism and the vulgar and sterile provocations of the Nupes, this seems bent.
Emmanuel Macron, catalyst of hatred
Emmanuel Macron is not friendly. He is not empathetic, he is proud, and refuses to take a step back. That a pension reform is essential, that the “whatever the cost” has lasted far too long, that the future of France is engaged, it is true. But, at the same time, we can also say that the president has not kept a single one of his promises. Worse: he even went against the few ideas he seemed to care about, such as education, the passage from Jean-Michel Blanquer to Pap N’Diaye – who obviously no longer leaves his home, where he must brood a depression – demonstrates all the casualness of Emmanuel Macron – who basically prefers the symbolic grip of a “racialized” left-wing historian to the coherence that National Education sorely lacks to get out of the doldrums.
Beyond the pension reform, Emmanuel Macron catalyzes hatred. Protesters march against the president. And how to prove them wrong? Who still believes in change? To the reform? Who thinks he will liberalize labor? Reduce the bureaucratic standards that paralyze the country? Hearing him during his interview on Wednesday May 22 announce the priorities (education, health, climate) to come tasted like balls: weren’t these the projects supposed to be in progress since the first five-year term? What more can you expect? What else can he do? What can we hope for the next four years with this president, surrounded by transparent politicians, muzzling those who can overshadow him, refusing dialogue?
Emmanuel Macron stays straight in his boots. He agrees to be unpopular because he can no longer run for the next presidential election. He only regrets not having managed to make himself understood. He promises reforms, more likely to be passed by a fractured Parliament like France. However, a large majority of French people want a new reform, serious, rooted in reality, on immigration. It is cancelled. A majority of French people understand that France must be reformed, but the reforms seem to arrive in the public space unprepared, out of step with reality. On the other hand, the freedom to abort will be enshrined in the Constitution even though it is fortunately not in danger in France, and euthanasia and/or the right to suicide will be the next project for Macronie. When a president proves unable to rise to the challenge, the only thing left to him are the quick, badly done societal reforms that we may regret when it is too late. Macronism, which no one can define, will die with the end of Emmanuel Macron’s second five-year term. That’s the only good news.