The French Chief of the General Staff leaves to avoid the "politicization" of the position

President Macron, along with the Chief of the General Staff, General Lecointre, at the French national holiday parade, July 14, 2020.Christophe Ena / AP

General François Lecointre, Chief of the General Staff of the French Armies, will abandon his functions at his own request after the national holiday of July 14, as announced this Sunday by the Elysee Palace. Lecointre explained that the decision seeks to avoid the "politicization" of the position, which would have occurred if he had left coinciding with the end of the first five-year presidential term of Emmanuel Macron in May 2022.

“I did not want it,” Lecointre justified in an interview with the RTL radio station, “because I think it is important that there is no overlap, that the chief of the Army General Staff, who is a military chief, be associated with a political".

In July 2017, Macron, who had just come to power, appointed Lecointre, after a public confrontation, over the Defense budget, with the then Chief of the Armies, General Pierre de Villiers, which led to the resignation of De Villiers. .

Lecointre does not want to be the general of Macron, who, according to the polls, will contest the next presidential election with the candidate of the extreme right, Marine Le Pen.

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The departure of Lecointre (Cherbourg, 59 years old) is not a surprise to those involved. The general explained in the aforementioned interview that in November he already expressed to Macron his desire to retire and recalled that four years, which are the ones he has been in office, is a usual, even long, period for a chief of the General Staff. Then Macron asked him to reconsider his decision but ended up accepting his departure before the end of the presidential five-year period. He will be replaced by General Thierry Burkhard, current Chief of Staff of the Army.

The relief comes at a time of turbulence and strategic changes in the French Armed Forces.

First was the publication, in April and May, of two tribunes in the right-wing magazine

Valeurs Actuelles

signed by retired generals and anonymous ex-military men that described a France in the throes of collapse and hinted at the need for a military intervention to take the helm.

Exemplary sanctions

The tribunes, although the signatories did not include any prominent military man with name and surname, caused concern, not only because of what they said but because, as a survey revealed, the diagnosis of a France in decline and in an almost pre-civil war environment was shared by a considerable part of French.

Nor is the widespread sympathy among the soldiers for Le Pen's far-right National Regrouping (RN) party.

Lecointre announced exemplary sanctions.

Six of the signing generals - retired, but still linked to the military institution - have received calls to submit to a disciplinary council.

The other episode that marks the final stage of Lecointre at the head of the Armies is the announcement by Macron of the end of the so-called Operation Barkhane deployed in the Sahel since 2014 to combat jihadism.

The decision, announced on Thursday, does not mean the withdrawal of France from this area where it has been in an endless war for nearly a decade.

But it implies a redefinition of the mission, more focused on the fight against terrorists with special forces, and on its internationalization so that European partners assume a more prominent role.

With the departure of the United Kingdom from the European Union, the French army is the only one in the club with a nuclear weapon and the only one with the capacity and the will to deploy en masse in foreign operations, as has been the case in Mali, where it has 5,100 soldiers. . It is an army subjected to growing demands, such as the protection of the national territory since the 2015 attacks. A paradox is that, year after year, polls show that it is a popular institution, with an approval rating that exceeds 80% , but at the same time suffers a disconnection with the civilian population accentuated since the end of compulsory military service in 1997.

And this disconnection includes Macron, according to Lecointre, who told RTL: “What strikes me - but it is not the particular case of the President of the Republic, but of the entire political class and journalists as a whole - is that you do not know anything about the armies, because you do not know the heart of the armies ”. And he added: "The president, like anyone of his generation, has not experienced what are the long marches, the nights of boredom, the difficulty, the pain."