Et, suddenly, the temperature started to climb. A few days before the decision of the Constitutional Council, which must rule on Friday, April 14, on two crucial texts – the law raising the retirement age to 64 and the draft referendum of shared initiative launched by the left to try to counter it – the head of state put himself in a combat posture: from China, where he had gone on a state visit, Emmanuel Macron fired two arrows aimed at the interior without s embarrassed about whether a foreign land was the best place to send them off. The important thing was that Jupiter strikes and that it is heard.
The first targeted, Wednesday, April 5, Laurent Berger. The secretary general of the CFDT has become the figurehead of the intersyndicale as much as the substitute herald of a reformist left in need of a leader. For having dared to denounce, after a meeting at Matignon, the deafness of power and evoked “a serious democratic crisis”, the trade unionist got caught like a schoolboy. “Words have a meaning, and if we overuse them, we bring up the extremes”scolded Emmanuel Macron, for whom the conflict is in no way a political crisis but a social disagreement whose responsibility is, moreover, shared since the “CFDT has not proposed any other project”. What make Laurent Berger jump, who immediately denied this last point.
The second arrow hit, two days later, the Prime Minister, Elisabeth Borne, who, by advocating a period of « convalescence » after the heightened tensions of recent months and advocating that “ the unions do not come out humiliated” of the sequence, seemed to play its own score when his days at Matignon seem numbered. “The course was given by the Head of State during his television interview” of March 22, immediately recalled the Elysian entourage. Emmanuel Macron then asked the head of government to receive the unions and work on a roadmap, expanding the majority, which she is visibly struggling to do..
The risk of a blocked five-year term
Contrary to many of his predecessors who, after having put the country on fire and sword, wisely hunkered down, the host of the Elysée seeks above all to preserve his status as a transforming president. For those who claim to put an end to mass unemployment, lead the ecological transition, restore public services and complete the political recomposition, the stagnation after a year of renewal of mandate is equivalent to death. To ward off the risk of the last blocked five-year term, Emmanuel Macron wants to make the crisis a moment of catharsis. He pushes the actors to the limit and sees what path is emerging. Logical but perilous, while the country is in a state of great excitement and the image of its leader, judged « vertical » et « sun hours » by its detractors, has deteriorated sharply.
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