The six-pill packet lies on the restaurant table. The lid has been crushed and torn, each transparent plastic cavity is revealed: empty. The need to swallow, at regular intervals, small pieces of paracetamol, preferably codeine, becomes more intense every day; before my eyes dazzling lights dance and blur the image of my dining companion. The more his face becomes blurred, the more he resembles the future tenant of Matignon.
For the time being, he is only in charge of the Ideas section at L’Express and has promised to change mine by accurately reporting the latest gossip and juicy stories about the literary world. But barely seated at the table, here he is crushing me with his questions: “So, will it be Xavier Bertrand? And why doesn’t he appoint Cazeneuve? Do you believe in Thierry Beaudet? So who will be at Matignon?” Feigning assurance, admitting my ignorance?
Or repeat, as he has every day since May 7, 2017, that Emmanuel Macron is a disconcerting political animal, capable of making a decision one day and announcing it to the person concerned (appointing Catherine Vautrin as Prime Minister), before changing his mind the next day (finally appointing Elisabeth Borne), also accustomed to slow decision-making and having a frankly thwarted relationship with reality? I am still thinking about the most relevant response when my friend at the other end of the tablecloth asks again, barely hiding a burst of disdain: “You’ve been following Macron since 2017 and you have no idea what he’s going to do?”
It will be two Doliprane, all things considered. A little overdose can’t hurt in these troubled times. “Switch to MDMA instead,” suggests a former adviser to the president, to whom I confide by text message the weariness that has gripped me since the resignation of the Attal government. It is only Tuesday, September 3, and it is only 1 p.m. But seven years of closely observing Emmanuel Macron, dissecting his sometimes tortuous ideas, his convoluted strategies, his successive truths, have in recent days caused an epidemic of various ailments ranging from languor to frank depression. Political journalism, in France, does not kill but it does damage. The presidential errors since the dissolution have transformed this profession to which I belong into the Tartar Desert. Some have embraced the profession; “No, a vocation!” they corrected, Saint-Simonian stars in their eyes. Others dreamed of being Jean Cau, picking out unusual political figures from his Sketches from Memory. We had all read, quivering, Zweig’s biographies, fantasizing about mixing History and the sense of romance as well as he did; we had all reread Balzac before embarking on the intimidating writing of our first article… Bang, here we are, struck by Macronism and its errors. Political errors that soon turn into personal errors… Why can’t I find the name of the Prime Minister? What have I understood about Macronism? Why am I a political journalist? Vertigo: why am I on Earth? While these deep and troubling questions assail me, a more prosaic colleague writes to me: “I find this sequence terribly boring.”
50 days without a government is certainly still less than Belgium or Spain, as is pointed out at the Elysée, but more than enough to shake an individual whose job is to tell and analyze the backstage of power. 50 days without a government is as many days to renounce all loyalty, to wake up with the identity of one Prime Minister, to fall asleep with the image of another… “We are trapped”, coldly declares a friend swimming in the same bath. Tossed around by advisers, strategists, privileged interlocutors of the head of state who work consciously or to kill time, to thicken the fog surrounding the Elysée and Matignon. One scenario chases another, a meeting with a hypothetical Prime Minister is confirmed by those close to the president, then denied by the person concerned. When night falls, the despondency. Who should we trust? Is the head of state duplicitous? And his advisors? Where did I hide the sleeping pills?
Out of the darkness emerges this comforting and distressing word from a former close friend of the leader: “The Macronist entourage is also discovering in real time, all the drama of this moment is happening in the president’s head more than in the conversation.” One for all, all for one.
When suddenly, at the height of an unbearable wait, the name of a probable “technical” Prime Minister (Thierry Beaudet, the President of the Economic, Social and Environmental Council, for those who follow the news as an amateur) and not a political one emerges, it is terror that seizes us. Years of work, harassment of deputies, ministers, advisers, men in the shadows soon reduced to nothing by the appointment of a being that we have never or barely approached?
Only a prominent member of the political department of L’Express can find the energy to exclaim: “Don’t say Beaudet is an ass anymore”, while the head of a political newsletter, less apathetic than the others thanks to a vitamin D cure, cries out from the heart: “Over my dead Beaudet.” Before admitting, I already feel the beginnings of a headache. Conclusion of a fellow traveler of Emmanuel Macron: “If it ends with Beaudet, it’s because there is a god of onomastics.” As for me, doubts and metaphysical questions no longer give me any respite: where is good, where is evil? Should I ask for a transfer to the economics department?
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