Emmanuel Macron sows reconciliation and collects pans

The President’s Reconciliation Campaign French, Emmanuel Macronwith the street he faces the hostility of a part of the population, who has received him with saucepans in a sample of the scars that remain open by the crisis caused by the pension reform.

About to mark one year after his re-election, the Élysée tenant needs to relaunch his mandate, suffocated by popular rejection and by the lack of a parliamentary majority that compromises all his government action.

“The challenge is to recover the political initiative, something that is needed by a president who won the elections with an image of permanent reform, of always being on the move,” The director of the opinion observatory of the Jean Jaurès Foundation, Antoine Bristielle, assures EFE, referring to the political movement that Macron founded in 2016.

For that, it needs to end the crisis caused by a pension reform that was abruptly approved, forcing parliamentary mechanisms to the maximum and in the midst of an enormous popular response that the big unions and a large part of the population want to continue feeding.

The head of state and a good part of his government have multiplied the meetings with citizens, moments that those most hostile to the reform have taken advantage of to show them that the fight continues.

This has resulted in what some have come to call the “pan revolution”the instrument used by the protesters to make themselves heard from a distance imposed by the authorities, which in a somewhat grotesque turn even prohibited its use and that of any other noisy instrument in the vicinity of the president.

Beyond the anecdotes that have been lived, the passage shows well that Macron does not have an easy task before him in the four years that lie ahead of him.

“He is using the same strategy that he used to overcome the crisis of the ‘yellow vests’, that of making direct contact with the people”points out Bristielle, who considers that “this time it is less likely that it will work because the fracture with the population is more evident than then ”.

In addition, the president risks further galbanizing his authoritarian image as some of the stinging phrases he uses in his dialogues with the citizens, profusely covered by the media, turn against him.

“Eggs and pans are for cooking”, launched last Thursday to the committee of protesters who received him in Alsace.

Macron has taken his vertical conception of power to the extreme, in which he decides and he himself is accountable to the citizens, a recipe that, now, can be expensive, the political scientist develops.

Without a strong party to back him and willing to do without other interlocutors, such as the unions, the president faces the hostility of the people, which can generate an explosive recipe.

FALL IN POPULARITY

The polls have already begun to reflect the deterioration. Its popularity has plummeted and it is entrenched in the most faithful, a quarter of the population. But some polls have already appeared that indicate that in the event of a repetition of a third presidential duel against Marine Le Pen, the far-right leader would be the winner.

Macron made it clear in front of a protester that he does not plan to resign for now, which makes that option far away, but his lack of a majority in the chambers and the difficulties he is having to find solid alliances in other parties, keep the hypothesis of an advance alive. of the legislative

A scenario that is not favorable for him either, since in one year the president has seen his party go from being the most voted to third in voting intentions, after losing four points (22%), which places him behind the coalition of the left launched by Jean-Luc Mélenchon, which maintains its 26%, and of the extreme right, the great beneficiary of this crisis, which gains 8 points and reaches 26%.

Le Pen reaps the fruits of a social crisis that the left, Bristielle believes, has failed to capitalize on “perhaps because it has been too radical in its forms”.

The extreme right, he adds, moves well when the institutions enter into crisis and gain unpopularity and the population is open to trying “new recipes”.

Source: EFE