Parents who are keen to help their child progress in school sometimes take advantage of the summer period to buy him a holiday notebook, in order to improve his English, his conjugation or his maths. Emmanuel Macron has not yet gone on vacation, but he has been active since the beginning of July - and his change of Prime Minister and government - as if he also wanted to fill some strategic gaps. Monday, July 27 in the evening, we saw the President of the Republic in person, accompanied by ministers Gérald Darmanin (Interior) and Marlène Schiappa (Citizenship) pay a very symbolic night visit to the police in the 17th and 18th arrondissements of Paris .
The previous week, his new Prime Minister Jean Castex, who wants to make the "regal" a strong axis of his policy, had gone to Nice (Alpes-Maritimes) to step up on the subject of insecurity. Not to mention the twenty trips made by Gérald Darmanin since his arrival at Place Beauvau. Double bites for the executive, which has been attacked for months on these subjects by the right-wing opposition.
"Macron is weak on the regal", asserts relentlessly on the side of the Republicans (LR). A trial that the president himself relaunched by speaking of “incivility” about the death of a bus driver in Bayonne (Pyrénées-Atlantiques) and the assault by gunshot on a firefighter in the Paris region during of his intervention on July 21 on the 20 hours set of TF 1.
Rurality enters the Macronist vocabulary
Aware - results of the European and municipal elections and opinion polls in support - that the French have very little confidence in him in the environmental fight, Emmanuel Macron has also instructed his government to put the seers to green. Jean Castex thus reaffirmed during the weekend that ecology was "a priority" in a column published in Ouest-France, then announced the creation of three rail motorways. In the process, it was the new Minister of Ecological Transition Barbara Pompili who said Monday that she wanted to ban heated terraces - a claim from the environmental left. Encouraging? "There are great announcements, but above all a desire to preempt ecology as a portfolio of votes, rather than to really act", laments Sandra Regol, deputy national secretary of Europe Ecology - the Greens, who points to speeches " contradictory ”on the subject between members of the government.
Another word has also been added to the Macronist vocabulary: rurality. A Secretary of State was appointed especially on this issue, absent from the titles of previous ministries, Sunday, in the person of Joël Giraud. Should we see the paw Castex, claimed man of "territories", in order to try to reconcile the two France, after the crisis of yellow vests, and to repair the image of the "president of the cities"? "Macron, like a good part of the political class, has forgotten the rural territories", deplores the deputy (LR) Nicolas Forissier, former secretary of state for rural affairs under Jean-Pierre Raffarin, who sees there an encouraging signal… "on condition that you put in the means".
At the Elysee Palace, we first of all recall that "the mother of battles is that of employment". While recognizing implicitly that security, ecology or the question of territories are key subjects of the last two years of the quinquennium. "Does that mean in hollow that we have not been successful enough on these files, I'll let you judge." But, clearly, these are priorities ”, we slip. Emmanuel Macron is a strategist. He knows the threat that an environmental presidential candidate could represent, just as he is determined to overinvest his right lane to continue to stifle LR. And if he does not manage to become credible on these sensitive subjects, to fill in his gaps, he knows that he is probably taking the risk of personally failing the final exam. That of the ballot boxes.