Historical parallels, however subliminal, can be dangerous. It happened to Emmanuel Macron in his televised address on April 17. The French president set himself the objective of relaunching his second term, after the serious political and social crisis caused by the pension reform, with new initiatives that must be completed within a period of one hundred days, just for July 14, Bastille Day. , the national holiday.
Hundred days? The reference of Napoleon Bonaparte immediately arose among analysts. After returning from his exile on the island of Elba and regaining power in March 1815, he lost it definitively, one hundred days later, in the defeat at Waterloo. The emperor would die a prisoner of the English on another island, Santa Elena, in the Atlantic, six years later.
Macron is not Napoleon, but he is a true republican monarch, with more powers than most heads of state of democracies, thanks to the 1958 Constitution, tailored to General Charles de Gaulle. At this moment, however, a year after his re-election, Macron is a monarch under siege, with an unpopularity of 72% – according to the latest survey by Le Journal du Dimanche – and without a majority of supporters among the deputies in the National Assembly. .
The head of the Élysée and his ministers are received these days with loud pans, insults and booing on all their trips. They are called “reception committees”, an ironic euphemism. The police are forced to make spectacular displays. Yesterday it happened again to the president himself in Vendôme, in the Loir-et-Cher department, south of Paris. On Monday, in Lyon, the Minister of Education, Pap Ndiaye, was blocked in a train carriage, at the station, due to a protest, and had to be evacuated by the police. At night, at the Molière theater awards ceremony, in Paris, the head of Culture, Rima Abdul Malak, also had to face a response from the stage and forced to take the microphone to defend the government's management.
The Elysee is engaged in a "catharsis operation" to overcome the difficult situation and seek a new consensus. It is about turning the page on the pension reform as soon as possible and turning to other initiatives, such as improving the labor market, the ecological transition, a more pragmatic regulation of immigration, or institutional reforms to raise the quality of democracy. They are good intentions that collide with parliamentary mathematics. The only possible allies, the Republicans (LR, traditional right), in clear decline in recent years and highly divided, fear being completely blurred if they embrace Macron. They offer specific agreements, but not a stable agreement.
Despite his comfortable victory at the polls last year (58.5% of the vote compared to 41.5% for Marine Le Pen), Macron is haunted by an image of illegitimacy among many French people. It had already happened in his first victory in 2017. Now that impression has been reinforced. They reproach him for having forgotten the votes cast by those who only wanted to avoid Le Pen's triumph. Those voters are the most irritated. The anger grew even more when he decided not to put the unpopular pension reform to a parliamentary vote and approve it by decree. It was the straw that broke the camel's back. An offense in substance and in form.
French democracy, in reality, has been distorted for more than twenty years by the weight of the extreme right and the Republican front to stop the latter from coming to power. Jean-Marie Le Pen, in 2002, led to an exceptional transfer of votes to Jacques Chirac, the then conservative president. The phenomenon was repeated in 2017, Macron being the beneficiary against Marine Le Pen. The same in 2022.
Macron is not allowed to run for a third term, but Le Pen could run for the Élysée for a fourth time. The president and his entourage have long been concerned about the possibility of leaving the country, as a legacy of the second term, a victory for the far-right candidate in 2027. In an interview with readers of the newspaper Le Parisien, last Monday, Macron was asked if he saw it possible to have to pass the baton to Le Pen the day he left the Élysée. "Marine Le Pen will arrive if we don't know how to respond to the country's challenges and we get into the habit of lying or denying reality," he replied.
The current president is aware that he must achieve a minimum of successful catharsis, because facilitating the rise to power of the extreme right in France would be a morally hard defeat to accept. Not in a hundred days, but in four years, but a real Waterloo.
