Of course, there was this Italian YouTuber looking for the best croissant in Paris, jostled in the middle of a procession of demonstrators. This activist in dark glasses dancing on a techno background. And this couple seated on the terrace, quietly sipping a glass of red wine in front of a fire in Bordeaux, whose video has been shot all over the world, with the keyword #BeMoreFrench, a sort of tribute to the supposed French art of demonstrating . The flood of images taken from the mobilization against the pension reform, broadcast widely on social networks since January, has helped to fuel an amused, but also critical, even worried look among our European and American neighbors. The sequence also hardened the judgment passed on the country and its institutions, the 49.3 remaining generally little understood outside France. Above all, its young president, adored internationally in 2017, now seems to arouse a form of misunderstanding.
It is paradoxically among our closest European partners that the judgment passed on the executive is the most severe. Especially in Germany, where Emmanuel Macron was literally idolized in 2017. This president, whose liberal daily Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung made the composite portrait of the ideal politician – “younger than John Fitzgerald Kennedy, more liberal than Tony Blair and more European than Gerhard Schröder” – finally had to reform in a direction desired by the Germans. The pension crisis, even more than that of the “yellow vests”, perceived then as emanating from a France reluctant to change, has radically changed the way in which the head of state is viewed.
The French are certainly still seen as potential revolutionaries, incapable of accepting reforms that the Germans have made for a long time. But now, it is Emmanuel Macron, more than the French themselves, who is seen as responsible for the crisis. “We have rarely seen in France a government which, with such stubbornness, cuts itself off from the population and tries so arrogantly to override a legitimate opposition, writes the leftist daily daily newspaperon April 6, in a paper entitled “A stubborn government”. The conflict is in danger of degenerating into a crisis of the State, because the dialogue hardly exists any more between the two parties who are counting on the unconditional surrender of the opposing party. »
« Caricature »
After Emmanuel Macron’s interview on the 1 p.m. television news on March 22, the progressive weekly The time writes that he looks more and more like ” the caricature that his detractors have made of him for years. A prideful technocrat who has lost the ability to understand why he arouses so much anger. A gifted intellectual who has been so successful in his life that he cannot admit the slightest mistake”.
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