As Emmanuel Macron comes down the steps of the Elysée, he says to the interlocutor he meets: “I’m stripping the sails!” » In July 2014, the young Deputy Secretary General of the Elysée under François Hollande, eager for movement, left before returning as Minister of the Economy to denounce a ” disease ” French, the “corporatism”. Nearly a decade later, nothing weighs more heavily on the President of the Republic than impediment. “We do not change people”, murmurs a history of the Palace. Torn between the determination to reform and the concern not to set the country ablaze, Emmanuel Macron plays the same leitmotif, buried under the screed of a second thwarted five-year term.
On December 10, 2022, the Head of State again referred to corporatism in an interview with Sunday newspaper as “the French disease, the thing which rebuilt itself most quickly after the Revolution of 1789”. “This is my main political fight”summarizes the Head of State, destroyer of ” capture of the general interest by people for the benefit of their particular interests”. In his wishes for 2023, the President of the Republic is compelled to keep intact a “ambition to continue to transform our country in the face of corporatism”. And judge that it is still too little, too slow.
Lately, his interlocutors perceive signs of impatience. It is this remark, in a meeting with the sovereign ministers, on January 24, on such a committee: “Experts are always experts on the ancient world. » It is this trait of humor disqualifying a State clerk deemed to be conformist, whose name surfaces in a cabinet meeting: “If we need anything, we will ask him. » Always, the criticism of the corporatists targets pell-mell a fringe of the high administration, the unions, the regulated professions…
“Fluid society”
Informed of the mood of the Palace, Olivier Dussopt resuscitated the word dear to Emmanuel Macron by opening the debate on pensions, in the National Assembly. ” We were elected to rid the French of corporatism, to make society more fluid, to dry up rents”he spoke, Monday, February 6. “There is a great conservatism of the social partners”supported the Minister of Labor with the Monde the day after. Illustration with the end of special diets, debated on Friday January 10, which the Elysée describes as “a brick that will one day perhaps facilitate universal reform”while the current reform, however unpopular it may be, does not overturn the table.
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