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Arnaud Benedetti: "Jean Castex, the most famous stranger in France"

2020-07-03T19:34:55.326Z


FIGAROVOX / TRIBUNE - By appointing to Matignon a high official just out of the shadows, Emmanuel Macron returns to the center of the game and devitalizes the very political function of head of government, analyzes the specialist in political communication.


Arnaud Benedetti is associate professor at Paris-Sorbonne University. He is editor-in-chief of the political and parliamentary review. He published Le coup de com 'permanent (éd. Du Cerf, 2018) in which he details Emmanuel Macron's communication strategies, as well as La Fin de la com' (éd. Du Cerf, 2017).

From one Prime Minister to another, Emmanuel Macron strives to write his story in one of these ritual moments of the Fifth Republic. By separating from Edouard Philippe, he recalls the logic of institutions. It is not the media, nor the popularity curves that order the mechanics of the state at its highest level, but the institutional strength, pre-eminence thus remains at the Élysée Palace. The days leading up to the reshuffle were the days of estimates, creating a media narrative rich in assumptions all denied by the choice of the President. It then remains to give meaning to the decision of the Head of State.

Jean Castex embodies the local, the social, the senior public service.

The latter itself carries several readings. The first one is very communicative for immediate and somewhat easy interpretations: Jean Castex is the continuation in degraded mode of Edouard Philippe, without having the political capital of the latter. High official and elected local, but elected from this peripheral France who stood up during the movement of yellow vests, from the right but this time from the right Sarkozyst, former collaborator of Xavier Bertrand, he embodies the local, the social , the senior civil service. It is supposed to reassure local elected officials, symbolize the concern for solidarity, ensure the professionalism of public action. He was the man of deconfinement with Edouard Philippe, being able like him to take advantage of the good conduct of operations allowing a return to a normal life of the company. The elements of language for commentators of the continuous news can therefore quietly infuse; they will probably run in a loop to help ask the public the identification markers for this stranger, now the most famous in France ...

Beneath this layer of evidence are emerging other movements specific to the tectonics of political plaques. Some will not fail to see in the designation of Castex in Matignon the ever-increasing drift of the Macron continent towards the right, at a time when the left is apparently getting a start in electoral health and when the big cities see their operation a green moult of urban macronism. For the President, it would be time to change the electorate, to flirt broad and off its original bases in areas of conservative trading, whose apparent return of a green left may worry certain segments of opinion.

We are far from having learned all the lessons from a health crisis which has nonetheless exposed the deregulations of the "deep" state.

But the appointment of the new Prime Minister, a man with a political base still uncertain and consequently, with inevitably reduced autonomy, has especially an immediate effect while retaining the ideological coloring of Edouard Philippe to reinstall the President at the center of the game. majority by devitalizing the very political function of the head of government who is also the leader of the majority. Castex will administer, an additional extension of the field of technostructure in these times of crisis, strengthening the weight of administrative officials on politics, validating the Saint-Simonian essence of macronism even more, reducing the country's leadership to technical engineering, perhaps also saying that we are still far from having learned all the lessons from a health crisis which has nevertheless exposed the deregulations of the “deep” state, where we first need to a will of the State much more than a state of the wills of the great corps and other aristocracies ... of the State.

Source: lefigaro

All news articles on 2020-07-03

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