Reconfinement: "Macron passed his failures for a fatality"

Arnaud Benedetti is associate professor at Paris-Sorbonne University.

He is editor-in-chief of the political and parliamentary review.

He has published

Le coup de com 'permanent

La Fin de la com'

The fall campaign has started.

After that of spring, it does not look easier.

Confronted with an epidemic rebound of a strong intensity, the executive is forced to manage the failure of its strategy which aimed above all to avoid a reconfinement.

Here we are!

On July 14, the President of the Republic nevertheless certified eye to eye with the French that in the event of a second wave the public authorities would be ready to face it.

Emmanuel Macron, as the health crisis thickens, transforms, proportionately, into a mixture of Daladier and Reynaud subjected to the test of a public power which gives the feeling of chasing after events.

The “power point” thought played its full role in rationalizing a decision which shattered the communication of the executive.

It is in the hollow of this forge that the intervention of the Head of State took place.

It had one objective: to arouse the idea that the politician still controlled something, at a time when doubt is solidifying more and more.

To do this, the President "energized" his verb, setting the scene for the situation, describing the range of potential solutions and proposing, under the guise of a strategic choice, an outcome which has everything from retirement or "everyone in the shelters". »But which is presented as the fruit of a will.

The thought "power point" played full force to rationalize a decision which shatters the communication of the executive;

For all that, it did not lift the mortgages on the coherence of the overall plan on the one hand nor erased on the other hand the spectral question which haunts the minds on the dysfunctions which led to transform the company into a besieged citadel.

, the president without saying so subverted the mantra of “living with the virus” to turn it into a kind of “living with confinement”.

The virus has won the game, at least for a while;

his forces will progress further, also for a time yet, persisting in breaking down our health lines as the Head of State predicted, on the basis of the reports of his medical staff;

as a result we no longer have any choice but to enter "into the path of confinement" but a confinement which partly "deconfines" work and does not hinder schooling.

The president's methodical presentation could convince a fear-ridden society in the short term.

Without doubt, this headlong rush into short-termism has become the horizon of all the actors of the crisis: leaders, doctors and even citizens rally to it out of interest or resignation.

The blind emergency inhibits fundamental criticisms, other than those relating to the operational management of the pandemic.

It encloses the analysis in the immediacy of the commentary, preventing us from understanding that we are first going through a systemic crisis in the zero risk society and that the obsession with the latter leads us to prefer the shutdown of our freedoms in pursuit of a regular social functioning.

The specific temporality of the event, boosted by the permanent exposure of indicators (level of contamination, balance of hospital supply, mortality), also by the repeated reminder of the European context of the epidemic, has the effect of both to be amazed in order to better legitimize the rise in power of social constraint and to relativize the French situation with regard to the comparison, often superficial moreover, with our main neighbors.

This daily “communicating” typing of the figures and this transnational perspective constitute the two springs, extensively used by Emmanuel Macron during his intervention, to ensure the acceptability of opinions on an unfulfilled promise.

Because this is the whole issue: erasing from collective memory a double commitment, that of experience feedback which mechanically would allow to escape a new confinement.

It was not only necessary to veil or make up a failure in European and world fatality but to transfigure it in political will, whereas the whole history of this epidemic is since its emergence the history of the replacement of the art of government by automatic piloting. day to day: the opposite, in the end, of politics.