Macron displaying resilience as he embraces his inner conservatism

If you think that Dominic Cummings’s moonlight flit to Durham was a scandal, consider how you would have felt if it had been revealed that he dressed up as a member of the Metropolitan Police riot squad and proceeded to beat up a Black Lives Matter protester at a demo in Hyde Park.

This was the depth of crisis that confronted Emmanuel Macron on the morning of July 18, 2018, three days after France won the World Cup. The President, starting his second year in office, was on his way to a triumphalist meet-the-people tour of the Dordogne when news broke that his head of security, Alexandre Benalla, a close confidant, newly appointed as deputy chief of staff, had disguised himself as an officer of the CRS and assaulted a young woman taking part in an anti-government demonstration on the Champs Élysée.

Macron was stunned. He trusted Benalla. Indeed, he trusted him with his life. How could this have happened?

But worse was to come. Benalla was subsequently exposed as holding forged diplomatic passports that allowed him to engage in secret talks with controversial African leaders. He had also, it was found, been in discussions with several Russian oligarchs, including one suspected of being close to the Russian mafia.

For Benalla, it was a career-ender. He was suspended, then sacked, from the Élysée and remains under investigation for fraud. But for Macron, it was the start of a triple-annus horribilis.

Whammy number two happened just weeks later, when one of the President’s star Cabinet appointees, the environment minister Nicolas Hulot, resigned out of the blue.

“I can’t lie anymore,” he said, disarmingly. Macron had made all sorts of promises about climate change but, as the minister with his name on the door, his time in office had been “an accumulation of disappointments”, and he was off.

Hulot is France’s best-known climate change activist – a combination of David Attenborough and George Monbiot, with just a whiff of Hugh Grant – and his departure registered not only with voters but with the governing En Marche party, many of whose younger members were beginning to suspect that Macron was not all that he claimed.

Meanwhile, unbeknownst to anyone living inside the Paris périphérique, provincial France was stirring – and not in a good way. The gilets-jaunes, ordinary citizens upset by a rise in the price of diesel, were about to go on the march and would rampage through Paris every weekend for months on end, bringing the capital to a standstill and presenting to the world an image of a nation moving out of control into a state of near-anarchy.

At first, Macron tried to tough it out. The protesters would get tired of being beaten up by the police and the nation would come to its senses. But when this turned out not to be the case, he reversed the diesel increase and donned a hair shirt, as if he were Henry II after the murder of Becket. He was now the listening President, he said – a President for all the people. He went on a three-month tour, dropping in on community centres up and down the country, nodding and taking notes. The voters, it was reckoned were not impressed. But if nothing else, they gave him marks for trying.

Come the spring of 2019, it was time to throw off the hair shirt and retrieve the hastily discarded mantle of Jupiter from the presidential laundry basket. This time, he would take on the railway workers and anyone else in the public sector who objected to his proposed reform of the generous – and notoriously complex – state pension scheme. The unions were ready and took to the streets. Once again, Paris was a battleground. But as the smoke cleared, neither side could claim victory. The reforms were not enacted, but nor were they off the table.

It was at this point that Notre Dame went up in flames. The cathedral, as precious to France as Westminster Abbey to the English, was nearly consumed by a fire started accidentally that left it roofless, without a spire, its windows blown out and its walls seriously cracked and charred. It was a time for tears, and for once Macron found the right words. He vowed to rebuild Notre Dame within five years, he said. Those listening noted that this would mean he could still be President, ready to claim all the credit, but they were moved by his response and supportive of the effort over which he would preside.

It was time to get back to business. Macron was determined that his five-year term should move out of stasis and into attack mode. It was time to have another go at the unions. His pension reforms had not gone away, he said. And nor have we, said the unions. But no sooner had the two sides squared up for round two of what was billed as the fight of the century than the coronavirus hit, and France moved into lockdown.

All that had loomed large before now seemed small and inconsequential. Macron was slow to react at first. He didn’t seem to appreciate the full seriousness of the situation. But he was not alone in that and over the course of the next few months showed that he was a capable crisis manager, less effective than Angela Merkel (no surprise there), but better than Boris Johnson and ready to take the tough decisions.

Today, with the pandemic not quite in remission and predicted to re-emerge in full force over the winter months, Macron is relying on a new prime minister, Jean Castex ­­– previously charged with overseeing the Government’s everyday response to the crisis – to contain the virus and to give him the space he needs to ensure an effective economic recovery. At the same time, he has given up all pretence of being a man of the left and embraced his inner conservatism.

As in Europe generally, and across the world, it is employment and growth that have moved front and centre in the Élysée. Macron had begun to make progress on jobs. The graph was moving, albeit slowly, in the right direction. But now millions of workers face redundancy at a time when the state is desperately short of cash and about to embark on the biggest borrowing spree in French history. Making sense of it all and plotting a course through the chaos is the challenge for our times, and for the President the ultimate test of his leadership.

The good news is that the voters, including a majority of would-be communards, appear to realise that this is not the moment to push their luck. The far-left and the far-right excepted, they are giving the President a chance to prove his worth. They were reassured when he volunteered significant pay rises for doctors, nurses and other health workers, who have worked tireless throughout the pandemic. They were impressed, too, when his European lobbying helped bring about the largest-ever EU rescue and recovery package. They may even have detected a new humility in his language and a recognition that it is time for the nation to pull together if it is not to pull itself apart.

Poll numbers prove very little. They come and go. But for the moment Macron has proved his resilience. Despite tacking markedly to the right with his latest round of ministerial appointments, he looks to have earned a period of respite from the non-stop criticism that at several points during the last three hectic years threatened to overwhelm him. How he uses that time will not only determine whether or not he wins a second term in office in 2022, but how he is remembered in French history.