“We are nice, we are between Care Bears, we don’t speak too loudly, and from time to time, we raise our voices a little…” Thus spoke, in July 2022 already, a minister who had his classes in the ranks of the Socialist Party. “We” are the representatives of the left wing of Macronie, who a few weeks earlier saw the former Republicans Bruno Le Maire remain the undisputed master of Bercy, Gérald Darmanin and Sébastien Lecornu land at the Interior and the Armies , and felt their president slipping little by little towards one of the two camps of “at the same time”. “Ideologically, Emmanuel Macron is more to the right than to the left”, even admitted Christophe Castaner softly at the end of the first five-year term.
And yet, they had a narrow escape: if the ex-boss of Beauvau, the always faithful Richard Ferrand and the ex-Elysian adviser Philippe Grangeon, helped by François Bayrou, had not urgently dialed the number of the head of state on a weekend in May 2022, it would be the ex-LR Catherine Vautrin, and not Elisabeth Borne, who would be staying in Matignon today. It is a victory to be savored. There are not a hundred. And now ? The future of the Prime Minister is in suspense, like the continuation of the quinquennium. Is there a better time to claim your rights?
“Left wing, right wing… Nothing pisses the president off more than that,” says Civil Service Minister Stanislas Guerini. In a majority coordination meeting at the Château, shortly before the vote on the pension reform (which will ultimately not take place), the secretary general of the Elysée Alexis Kohler also warned his executives: “Be careful with what you read in the press. I hear say ‘turn to the right’ because we made an agreement with the LR, I hear say ‘turn to the left’ because we would make an agreement with the left… Not at all! There will be no line changes.” The years pass, the sacrosanct “overcoming” of divisions remains, even if there remains, internally at least, an artifice: the notions of “right” and “left” have never ceased to govern the balance of power within Macronie. Even more since the executive must find allies to vote on its texts… And everyone has in mind that the president cannot run for a third successive term.
By refusing the establishment of identified currents within his movement, Emmanuel Macron has created a jungle around him where the law of the strongest is transformed into the law of the most audible, and therefore sometimes of the most provocative. “Politics with us has become an individual sport”, regrets a member of the government appointed ten months ago. In this little game, the history of the last six years has shown, the experienced from the UMP are the best: inside the government, Darmanin and Le Maire play their little music and push their line respective; outside, Edouard Philippe, crowned with the title of favorite personality of the French, knows that the least of his syllables is scrutinized. Lately, it is the Minister of the Interior who has particularly distinguished himself by speaking of “intellectual terrorism” about La France insoumise, by dismissing back to back “the plague” LFI and “cholera” RN and by threatening the League for Human Rights to cut its subsidies.
The counter-speech did not take long to appear: first Transport Minister Clément Beaune, in Release, then Renaissance MEP and President of the European Parliament’s Environment Committee Pascal Canfin, in The world, slammed the initiatives of the former mayor of Tourcoing and called not to ally only with Les Républicains. The left wing releases its claws, momentarily. Does it have the means to be heard other than in reaction? To really weigh? Especially since Richard Ferrand, Christophe Castaner or even Philippe Grangeon, if they continue to advise Emmanuel Macron in private, have come out of the media system… “Since there are no internal debates, there are only where there, only personal positions, indicates a Renaissance deputy. We cannot say that there is a structured wing, the problem of the left in Macronie is that it is always divided. And then, quite simply: it means say what, being on the left in Macronie?”
We go a long way. Several Social Democratic ministers – Olivier Dussopt, Clément Beaune, Roland Lescure, Pap Ndiaye, Laurence Boone, Rima Abdul Malak, Isabelle Rome – organize what they call “Grenelle” dinners, named after their WhatsApp loop. But the atmosphere is more one of camaraderie (and even more…), even a search for comfort for certain rather retiring ministers, than the construction of a common corpus and an esprit de corps. However, for some of them, the pension reform, at least the way it was explained, suffered from a vision and a word that was a bit too conservative. “I would not have been more illegitimate than others to go on the sets to defend it, to bring something else”, grumbles one of them, frustrated to have seen the same five or six members of the government sent at the forehead. For the others, Matignon had decided: mouth shut. It is more careful. A few minutes after the triggering of article 49.3 on March 16, another member of “Grenelle” lets go on the phone: “It’s the failure of the good old popol of the right to daddy, the Darmanins, the Lecornu , by Thierry Solère [NDLR : conseiller officieux d’Emmanuel Macron]who thought they would bring the LRs quietly thanks to their high patronage.
What is missing then this left wing, ultimately no more disorganized than the right wing whose members will not go on vacation together? From a form of transgression, no doubt. Freedom of tone. “On the other side, they express themselves without taking too many precautions or asking for authorization, confides a leftist minister. To get out of this spirit of Care Bears precisely, we must also assume this side ‘I speak and I I’ll see what happens afterwards. You have to do controlled skids, the important thing is to take the car.”
But to achieve this, you still need sufficient political capital to create a balance of power… And this is where the shoe pinches and where the snake bites its tail. This social-democratic magma in Macronie is paying for a cruel lack of leadership, which some are nevertheless trying to conquer. In the entourage of the Minister of Labor Olivier Dussopt, it is subtly pointed out that he is the only one to be at the head of a party, Territories of Progress, which claims 2,600 members, including 1,500 up to date with contributions. For his part, the former Minister of Health Olivier Véran has great ambitions but his role as government spokesperson does not favor his emancipation.
The most stirring in the period is undoubtedly Clément Beaune, who has never hidden, for several months, that he would see himself occupying a role of incarnation. “This left-wing sensibility is the basic DNA of macronism and has never really been assumed, he says. We must not let it disappear or turn it into an eco-museum made up of a few weakened former socialists.” The young Minister of Transport swears to have received messages of support from many parliamentarians after his recent media outings. Some of his “comrades” suspect him – rightly – of also playing a personal score, notably targeting the town hall of Paris: “He has no one behind him, he gets lathered up for nothing, we don’t invent ourselves a leader politics just by pointing the tip of his nose from time to time,” breathes another left-wing minister. Atmosphere at Care Bears. To be weakened and yet locked in picrocholine wars? This is also the left.