Tuesday March 21, at the start of the evening, Emmanuel Macron speaks at the Elysee Palace in front of his majority. The deputies are exhausted by incandescent weeks in the National Assembly. Ministers are petrified by the images of the spontaneous movements caused by the use of 49.3 to push through the pension reform. The President of the Republic promises to set the course again. But not immediately, later. “By Summer”he eludes, before letting go: “Anger makes everything inaudible. »
As often when he only has the choice between bad solutions, he tries to stop time. At the risk of giving the impression of a palace “bunkerized” and a locked up head of state “in his ivory tower”. “Not going out for three weeks would be catastrophic, it would have a Baden Baden side”, notes one of his relatives. So, from the weekend, the Elysée begins to consider a trip.
But how to blacken the political pages of a suspended time, oscillating between political paralysis and social instability? For a few days, the advisers racked their brains to resolve the many dilemmas: showing themselves but not exposing themselves to possible disputes, responding to the anxieties of the ” everyday life ” but avoid questions about pensions, talk about the future when the present monopolizes the attention…
“A turning point in our approach”
Thursday, March 30, the Head of State will therefore go to Savines-le-Lac (Hautes-Alpes). In front of the Serre-Ponçon lake, the first freshwater reserve in Western Europe very affected by drought, he will present his government’s “water plan”, “a turning point in our approach”, according to the Elysee Palace, which aims to prepare for the summer of 2023 and sobriety by 2030. A speech announced on Wednesday, at the last minute. Why take hold of it at this time? “He wishes to bring to his level the major strategic orientations of ecological planningdeciphers his entourage. Pensions are a subject of tension. But the thirty-two days without rain this winter have affected many French people too. »
While the unions have announced a new day of mobilization on Thursday April 6, the Head of State hopes to find a space to address other themes. At the risk of opening a new debate on water management, five days after violent clashes between the police and radical activists around the mega-basin project in Sainte-Soline (Deux-Sèvres).
This choice is not trivial. To get out of the quagmire of the pension reform, the President of the Republic wants, in the months to come, to concentrate on projects that allow him to project himself into the future and to evoke the daily life of the French, one of the executive communication obsessions. Ecological planning, one of the major challenges of the second five-year term, also makes it possible to talk to a section of young people, who are very concerned about this “fight of the century”in the words of Emmanuel Macron, during his campaign speech in Marseille, April 16, 2022.
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