There are oversights that sometimes say a lot. While Emmanuel Macron must decide on the possibility of starting Monday May 11 the deconfinement of France, another appointment went under the radars of the presidential agenda, and not just any: the anniversary of his election, three years ago. "I admit that I hadn't even thought about it ..." confided this Wednesday, May 6, one of his collaborators, almost embarrassed by his confessions. Sign of a time when the days of power are rather punctuated by the health, economic and social emergency of the country, and especially the uncertainty of the coming days, the entourage of the Head of State would he have decided not to not mark it? "We will do nothing, the context does not lend itself to it, it has not even been mentioned, we swear. And then, frankly, few people have understood that it is the effective three years of his birthday. Nobody talks about it ”.
The atmosphere was quite different on May 7, 2017, when Emmanuel Macron, just elected president, the youngest of the Fifth Republic, entered the Place du Carrousel in the Louvre. "Tonight, it is a fervor, an enthusiasm, it is the energy of the people of France", he then declaims in front of thousands of supporters. But he also knows it: “It won't be easy every day. The task will be tough. ” In this area, it has even been served, with three years turned upside down by as many crises at the highest summit of the State: from the Benalla case in yellow vests, to this terrible epidemic of Covid-19 which puts the country almost at a standstill, to the point of exploding the economic foundations of its program.
VIDEO. Presidential: "Our task is immense," warns Macron at the Louvre
We could also add pension reform, such as the political crises marked by the resignations of several ministers suspected of irregularities, including François Bayrou, Richard Ferrand, François de Rugy and Jean-Paul Delevoye. And what about these presidential sentences, sometimes awkward or poorly understood, which marked out this first part of the mandate and also set the pace of its popularity curves. Did he learn from it when he entered the last two years of his mandate?
"Nothing has been spared him"
In private, the head of state leaves little evidence of his possible personal and political injuries. “He never does public introspection. So it’s up to the entourage to decode, understand and anticipate. You must know how to read Emmanuel Macron, because he is someone who never reveals his intimacy of thought. Never, "says one of his visitors, according to whom the president is a follower of Cardinal de Retz and his famous precept," You only get out of ambiguity at your expense. " "I'm not saying he's calm, but he's always calm, Emmanuel. He faces. At the same time, after all that he has known in three years, admit that it is heroism. Nothing has been spared him, "bounces Senator François Patriat, one of the very first to join him during the conquest of 2017.
The members of his cabinet also remember this sentence pronounced during a meeting in his office, in the middle of the yellow vests crisis: "Where there is hatred, there is love", persuades Macron on this day December 2018, despite surveys at abysmal depths. A month later, he took up the thread of his relationship with the French ... thanks to the great national debate. His idea. "A stroke of genius," still think his relatives today.
“When he went back down into the arena, he got better. He has reconstructed his presidential legitimacy, "analyzes one of them, recalling" one of the principles dear to his two favorite philosophers, Paul Ricœur and Jürgen Habermas, namely the theory of recognition: everything starts from you and everything comes back toward you. This applies to expressions of love… as well as disaffection. ”
"We still have a long way to go and he is aware of it"
It remains to be seen what will be the state of its relationship with the French people at the end of the health crisis that the country is experiencing today, even more so with the approach of 2022. "Many French people have an image of themselves that is radically opposite of his personal reality. A guy who loves Audiard and Sardou, as well as Stendhal, and who passes for an uprooted banker, is that there is something that we did not succeed. We still have a long way to go and he is aware of it, ”decrypts a believer, while others believe that it is all the software that we will have to rethink in this perspective.
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In his speech on April 13, had the President of the Republic not called on the French to "reinvent myself, me first", in particular by going "off the beaten track" and "ideologies"? “All these crises will lead him inexorably to remake an inventory of the macronism. He will have to redefine himself and at the same time restructure his movement, ”says François Patriat. He explains: "He was elected because the French wanted to put an end to the sterile right-left opposition. Working! had responded to this aspiration in 2017. But now that we are in the era of health, economic and social uncertainties, we must respond to the post-crisis and redo an analysis of globalization. Both he and his movement will have to embody this. ”
With a martingale already shelled over its recent public interventions: that of concord, of national union, supposed to also embody this "France after", but which its communicators have already renamed by the concept of "United France". Like a campaign slogan…