“Emmanuel Macron had to launch operation survival, less than two years after his re-election”

2024-01-09 07:15:08

It is always presumptuous, in politics, to want to draw up plans as the facts try so hard to contradict them. When, barely re-elected, in April 2022, Emmanuel Macron tried to mark his last mandate, he scheduled the break for the day after the European elections of June 2024, when the ball of contenders would crystallize and he would have to close ranks around his faithful. The calculation was too optimistic: less than two years after his re-election, the head of state had to launch operation survival.

His first days of January are devoted to the development of a laborious change of the government team in the hypothetical quest for a new lease of life. The objective is to limit losses during the next electoral battle which is taking place on the preferred terrain of the presidential majority, Europe, and yet does not present itself under the best auspices. From start to finish, macronism will remain a fight.

Originally, the doctrine was that of openness, progress, and optimism. Six years have passed, and the head of state is worried about the “decivilization”speaks of a necessary “civic rearmament” and shocks some of its troops by letting the government run behind the radicalized right to pass the immigration bill.

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The final version of the text may have distorted the point of balance initially defended, but the Elysée let it pass, judging that it was politically more dangerous not to have a text at all, given the state of the The majority of opinion is in favor of a tightening of migration policy.

Very lonely

Emmanuel Macron is not the first President of the Republic to move to the right or to place himself at odds with some of those he had seduced: under the five-year term of Nicolas Sarkozy, the Grenoble speech, delivered in July 2010, marked a turning point and confirmed the failure of the policy of openness successfully attempted three years earlier by the leader of the right. By drawing a direct link between immigration and insecurity, Nicolas Sarkozy had definitively lost the left and upset the center.

Under the mandate of François Hollande, the proposal, following the attacks of November 13, 2015, to include in the Constitution the forfeiture of nationality for dual nationals convicted of acts of terrorism, including those born in France, had constituted a point rupture and accelerated the disintegration of the majority.

In all three cases, the electoral dynamics of the far right explain the drift from the initial positioning: quickly worn down by the trials of power, the tenants of the Elysée lose their ability to project the country into a happy future and become more permeable to speeches of denunciation or stigmatization of their main adversary. The fact is that in six years the hardening of the international context has contributed to reinforcing the feeling of insecurity in France and increasing the demand for protection.

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