I am looking at the website of Le Figaro, France’s leading Conservative newspaper. Bear in mind that Emmanuel Macron and his wife have returned from their island retreat off the coast of Provence and that the political season triggered by La Rentrée, when France comes back from its holidays, is about to begin in earnest.
Here, then, is the “front-page” news, according to Figaro.fr:
• Trump accuses his former lawyer of lying
• Trump presidency surrounded by judicial investigation.
• “Scared and ashamed”, Jimmy Bennett breaks his silence on Asia Argento
• Samu [the French telephone emergency service]: millions of calls for help go unanswered
• Brother-in-law of Alexia Daval [a woman found murdered in 2017] calls in a celebrated defence lawyer.
Only when we turn to the online equivalent of page 8 do we get to a story connected to the President:
• State looks to deliver increases but a net reduction in taxes
The key paragraph in the accompanying story spells out the problem.
“While the Executive continues to conceal the precise means by which it intends to keep its commitment to the European Union in terms of lowering the public deficit, the Élysée has already warned that the [upcoming autumn] budget will include “increases” and “a net reduction”. The Government, which has promised not to raise taxes, will have to make significant savings if it wants to meet its fiscal deficit reduction targets of 2.3% of GDP in 2019.”
Next up on Figaro’s newslist is an interview with the political commentator Jérôme Jaffré beneath the headline, “Relationship between Macron and the French has been altered”.
French pundits have a lot in common with their British counterparts. They follow each twist and turn of the ongoing political narrative and stick the knife in at every opportunity. But they are also, being French, inclined to see whatever is going on as part of the eternal struggle between the leadership in Paris (aloof and self-serving) and France itself, which is characterised as if it were an innocent player in the drama.
Thus, Jaffré, in remarking that the summer now ending marks a turning point in Macron’s presidency, reminds us that the Republic, weakened by recent events, is “rearing up” against the man it elected in a landslide only 18 months ago.
He may be right. Jupiter has gone into retrograde in recent months. France, even more than the UK, wishes to have its cake and eat it. It wants reform of its antiquated labour laws so that employers have more latitude to hire and fire. It accepts that the present system, which rewards the long-term unemployed and provides for early retirement, is outdated and unsustainable. But the same citoyens want cast-iron assurances that they will not lose their jobs, or the benefits that go with them, and they all want to be able to retire at 55. Square that circle, if you can.
The rail strike that dominated the spring ended when the workers ran out of cash and stomach for the fight. But Macron’s victory came at a cost. The unions are in a belligerent mood and stand ready to oppose any further assaults on their ancient liberties, which they firmly believe were handed down to them, on tablets of stone, by the Revolution.
MPs, too, are testy. Macron’s party, La République en Marche, which he designed on the back of an envelope to provide parliamentary backing for his reform programme, won two thirds of the seats in last summer’s general election. But its strength is also its weakness. It doesn’t really stand for anything other than making France run again, as if it were a train whose wheels had seized and needed a good oiling.
The party’s 311 deputies came in on Macron’s coat-tails and have the problem, 15 months on, of discovering what exactly reform means. Some of them are old school socialists, who felt that the steam had gone out of their movement. Others are Blairites, keen to exploit the nation’s dynamic centre, which they imagine to be rational, well-intentioned and impatient for change. Some, like Macron, are reform-minded Conservatives. The problem, again, is that most of the French want change for others, not themselves.
As he settles back into the Élysée, Macron knows that his honeymoon with his countrymen and women is well and truly over and that the reform programme he plans to push through in the next 12 months will be resisted by both Left and Right, all the way from Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s La France Insoumise to the Front Nationale, which, though gravely weakened, is threatening a revival led by Marine Le Pen’s feisty niece, Marion Maréchal.
The question is, can Macron reimpose discipline on his party, so that he gets the bulk of his reforms passed into law without fracturing his support to the point of disintegration? Can he make measurable progress, beyond rhetoric, on suppressing 120,000 jobs in the bloated public sector? Can he honestly hope to persuade the French to give up their complex and costly pensions regime in favour of a streamlined, but less generous provision? Can he increase defence spending, as he promised Donald Trump? Can he deliver on Brexit, standing firm on the integrity of the Single Market and Customs Union while actively encouraging thousands of bankers and others to abandon London for Paris?
Most of all, can he shake off the increasingly pervasive image of himself as the President for the Rich, who privately measures success in the numbers of billionaires created during his term in office?
Note that I haven’t so far mentioned l’Affaire Benalla, the scandal surrounding Macron’s former head of security, charged with impersonating a police officer and beating up May Day protesters in Paris. Benalla – who worked closely with the President and was trusted by him – has by no means gone away. The wheels of justice are turning, and the Senate, tasked with investigating what happened, is expected to interrogate Benalla in the course of the next few weeks.
My feeling is that Macron will have learned as much from the affair as he will have lost. Every President – every leader – faces challenges from unexpected quarters, and this was his. He will be damaged, but ultimately not broken.
In the meantime, as the French motor back from Brittany, Provence and the Vendée, they are not yet in an obviously vindictive mood, and the news of the day is more about America than it is about Macron. When that changes, which it will, we should be able to judge what reserves this most fixated of presidents has at his disposal and how quickly he is prepared to throw them into the fight.
