What wouldn’t Boris Johnson give to trade his problems for those of Emmanuel Macron? Comfortably re-elected last April, the French president finds himself six weeks later 39 seats away from an absolute majority in the National Assembly. Here it is now with a minority government, surrounded on both sides of the political spectrum by opposition.
However, and this is huge, no one asks for his head anymore. Macron is guaranteed to occupy the highest office of the Ve Republic until the spring of 2027. But depending on what happens in the Assembly’s lion’s den, he will go down in history as a remarkable president, or just as the last representative of a string of leaders of the insignificant state.
After a drawn-out election campaign and months of managing a busy political daily life, including the Russian invasion of Ukraine, Macron is said to be exhausted and not in his best shape. He is older than 44 and has lost that drive which in 2017 almost made him a UFO in the recent French political class. No doubt he is looking forward to the holidays with his wife at Fort Brégançon, the presidential resort on the Côte d’Azur where for three summers he hosted his Russian counterpart, Vladimir Poutine.
But we must continue to govern France, with or without the president, and Élisabeth Borne, newly appointed Prime Minister, gave her general policy speech on Wednesday July 6. : it announced a pension reform which will include a gradual increase in the retirement age, and measures against the purchasing power crisis and in favor of health services, very tested, in particular by the Covid. The government will remain firm in its ecological ambitions, she told the parliamentarians, and it is with this aim that the Prime Minister has undertaken to give France access to energy sovereignty by allowing the State to set up 100% of EDF’s capital.
Great ideological confusion
Elisabeth Borne, a technocrat with centrist convictions who briefly joined the Socialist Party, does not even pretend to want to make a revolution. His goal is, conversely, to work with the president to make the economy more resilient in these times.