“Édouard Philippe did not manage to hide the initial gropings of crisis management”

Arnaud Benedetti is associate professor at Paris-Sorbonne University. He is editor-in-chief of the political and parliamentary review. He notably published Le coup de com 'permanent (Cerf, 2018).

It was the Prime Minister of a country with obsidional fever who spoke on Tuesday. The head of government, a man of all burdens, starting with that of a public voice weakened by two months of uncertain crisis management, was faced with three main issues: truth, precision, simplicity. On these three criteria, he practiced the policy of "half empty glass" or "half full", managing a company in difficulty who is fully aware of playing his survival.

Concentrated on himself, not without a form of didactic talent, Édouard Philippe recalled at the outset the social constant: there can be no society that continues if it does not continue to make society, in other words if it cannot find the natural bed of its daily course. Since the essential remedy can eventually become worse than the disease, the host of Matignon came before the national representation to decline his discourse on the method of deconfinement. Beyond the principles displayed "Progressiveness, prudence, territorialization", it should read "concerned, tedious, sourceux and a bit shady".

The Prime Minister was for the occasion wanted general and marshal of the houses, fixing all at the same time a sketch of battle plan and providing some practical elements (on the tests, the "fortnight" with hotel or family option, the departmental follow-up , the end of the arrest for daily commuting, etc.). Structured, constructed, studious, the form did not manage to conceal that the background remained the product of the initial gropings of crisis management. Halfway between light and dark, between a "deconfinement" on May 11 subject, a deconfinement "saucissonné", with "stop and go" according to the departments, constraints with variable geometry, Édouard Philippe s' is the apocryphal of a past that has been sticking to the skin of public action for almost two months. The general was somewhat hampered by the inadequacies of the marshal, a very embarrassing schizophrenia for a liberator, but the aim was to cover weeks of hesitation and shortages with a delicate palimpsest to show that this time .. .we were ready.

With seriousness, the head of government got down to the task, a traveling salesman, almost without luggage from the horizon of May 11 born of the presidential verb. The hard part remains to be done: that reality sticks to words. The strategy adopted very cautiously, calling for help also at the local level, day-to-day raiding, a "light outing" and conditioned is undoubtedly that of a pragmatism that bets on success whose executive would be credited in terms of deconfinement to better forget the long wandering of an uncertain conduct of events.