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"From now on, the president has no choice but to succeed in the vaccination"

2021-02-03T18:13:35.922Z


FIGAROVOX / INTERVIEW - For Arnaud Benedetti, the surprise intervention of Emmanuel Macron this Tuesday evening on TF1 was intended to silence criticism of the vaccination campaign. His success will now be decisive for the political future of the Head of State, judge the communicator.


Arnaud Benedetti is associate professor at Paris-Sorbonne University.

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

He has notably published

Le coup de com 'permanent

(ed. Du Cerf, 2018) in which he details Emmanuel Macron's communication strategies.

FIGAROVOX.-After his surprise speech last night, has Emmanuel Macron once again become "the master of the clocks", the one who dictates the tempo?

Arnaud BENEDETTI.-

It is the events and the overlapping controversies about vaccines that force him to intervene.

It is the politico-media agenda which imposes itself on him more than it controls the latter.

While the issue of supply continues to gain in importance in the public debate, his intervention certainly aims to regain the initiative, to show that it is he who gives the "

la

" and who decides in the last instance, to like the announcement of the executive on Friday not to carry out a new confinement immediately.

However, this unexpected communication, which is a bit off-the-

cuff

, is first and foremost the product of a situation that seems poorly controlled, of an obvious tension that weighs on the pace of the deployment of the vaccination campaign and of a significant halo of organizational dysfunctions.

Presidential communication was intended to be educational, reassuring and visibility-enhancing.

It was settling into a calendar that the media had not anticipated, such as the intervention of the Prime Minister in place of the Head of State at the end of last week.

Convening the effect of surprise, in order to communicate, aims to certify that one remains in control of the game. This is the desired effect obviously, but under the thin film of communication, the latter cannot completely conceal that, in its depths, public action is dependent on parameters that it does not manage to stabilize.

To read also:

Benedetti: "When Macron does the job of his Prime Minister"

And among these, and not the least politically, that France is not necessarily sovereign in its vaccine supply strategy, which it is constrained by the group purchasing policy, the methods of which are implemented by the European commissions are the object of now sustained criticism.

We often hear that it is the deep state that makes the decisions in France.

Is this intervention a way of recalling the powers of the President of the Republic?

The deep state, precisely, is a very ambiguous theme.

First, because the main French political leaders came from it, starting with the President of the Republic and his Prime Minister.

Then because to invoke it silently, as politicians sometimes do, is to admit their powerlessness, their failure to appropriate a machine of which at the end of the day, they would only be the clueless representatives, while they are, first and foremost, the delegates of popular sovereignty.

The head of state appears to manage a logistical issue, revealing the dysfunctions present in the chain of command.

The president with this intervention operates above all as the communicating corrector of his Prime Minister and the Minister of Health, as if the latter were not in a position to correctly explain the vaccination situation with which the country is confronted.

He is forced to re-enter the arena of practical Covidian management, a few days after sending his head of government to the media front to announce that there would be no reconfinement very soon.

"

The stewardship will follow

" said De Gaulle who practiced, with mastery, the delegation specific to the military system where the execution is carried out in the respect of the levels adequate for the good progress of the latter.

Here, the Head of State reappears to directly manage a logistical subject, certainly strategic with regard to the epidemic situation, but which nonetheless remains the revealing of the dysfunctions that exist in the chain of command.

The whole stake of this moment of presidential communication was to cut the road to the criticisms which mount on the subject of the lack of autonomy of France.

Does this hyperpersonalization of power entail risks?

Could its detractors not denounce a form of “authoritarianism”?

In the form the address of the Head of State was once again to deal with the essential.

The tight shot on the face of Emmanuel Macron, the invisibility of the interviewer, who does not appear during the entire sequence and who very factually revives the President, create a communication sequence that leaves little room for improvisation despite the obviously improvised temporality of it.

It was almost the return to a communication from another time, where the journalist disappears, and where only the total figure of the President absorbs all the attention and all the light.

The President tried to straighten out the chaotic narrative of our vaccine strategy, acknowledging that we were behind schedule.

This apparently once again “

on-the-go

speech

was obviously very much worked on upstream, notwithstanding its impromptu vignette character.

The tone was little “vertical”, it did not need to be because the presidential image, occupying the entire screen, spoke for itself in a way.

The register was that of “

pedagogy

”, the key word henceforth to explain that the problem is not so much a matter of substance (the organization of the State) as of form (the expression of it).

To read also:

Macron positive: "There is a hiatus between what the State imposes on the French and the practices of its leaders"

The President tried to restore order in the chaotic story of our vaccine strategy, recognizing devive voice

,

we had fallen behind, but, nevertheless, our choices were good, starting with that of the European software.

There is no other option under the Fifth Republic, given the nature of our institutions, to go back to the words of the President when the crisis absorbs and continues to absorb the entire national landscape.

Regardless of the holder of power, this is an invariant specific to our organization of powers.

Authoritarianism is a communicating factor which, despite themselves, is part of the expression of our regime.

It is more or less underlined according to the specific personality of each of our presidents, of course, but it is an element of our

institutional decorum

, if not necessarily so in practice.

The commitment made, on almost total vaccination before the summer, is it somehow a pre-campaign promise?

Emmanuel Macron is wise enough to know that he no longer plays his future and his potential re-election on his record as a reformist president.

There will be no more time, moreover, to carry out structural reforms.

It will be judged on its ability to get out of this crisis a country which lives, de facto, from day to day.

The condition for exiting the epidemic conditions the political future of macronism.

The issue of vaccines, from this point of view, is capital because it is apparently the condition for having collective immunity capable of freeing us from the virus.

He was cautious, moreover, avoiding to bet everything on a communication fetishizing too much the vaccine lever, by also insisting on the collective behavioral effort to achieve control of the situation.

He also played his role of coach, coaching the national body.

To read also:

Jean-Pierre Robin: "The 'hard things' which haunt Macron and would prevent him from representing himself"

He also opened the way slowly, to the use of the Russian vaccine, which shows that the state of tension is such on the stocks that what appeared improbable, even unspeakable a few months ago, is now becoming. hui in view of the urgency of the context.

Everything suggests that the communication which will be that of the Elysee, the government and the majority will aim to dispel this impression supported in the opinion that comparatively, France, particularly with regard to the idea of ​​excellence that 'she is made of her health system, has not necessarily lived up to her reputation and that she has not done better than the others, even sometimes worse.

This is to say if the condition of exit from the epidemic conditions the political future of macronism.

The risk in announcing vaccine deployment figures, as the President did, being to be contradicted by the facts.

But it is a constant of Emmanuel Macron that he likes to go "

towards his risk"

.

Moreover, more than ever perhaps, he has no other alternative than this ...

Source: lefigaro

All news articles on 2021-02-03

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