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The slap to Emmanuel Macron

2021-06-22T09:01:13.868Z


The gesture offers a rebellious resonance to the almost disappearance of the traditional parties and questions about the void of a shared project


A man slaps the French President, Emmanuel Macron, during the president's visit to Tain-l'Hermitage, in the Drôme department (France), on June 8 BFMTV / ReutersTV / Reuters

The head of the French State was slapped on June 8 by a citizen who has been sentenced to 18 months in prison for that attack.

Enmanuel Macron wanted to weigh his influence by visiting deep France before the start of the election campaign.

The slap has a highly symbolic meaning and highlights, once again, the disturbing degradation of the increasingly conflictive relationships between citizens and those who represent them in the country.

This dividing line separates, for decades, the rulers and the ruled, it even served as an electoral motto for Jacques Chirac, who won in 1995 denouncing the "social fracture";

Since then, all the candidates have been using this discourse to gain support among the silenced, especially in the poorer popular classes.

More information

  • The man who slapped Emmanuel Macron will serve four months in prison

To this central thesis, the extreme right has added the migratory "threat", Islam and Europeanism. And it can be said that the disaggregation of the entire political party system that emerged in France with the failure of the right in 2012, spread to the left in 2017, and was taken advantage of by Macron's pragmatism to achieve power, comes from this troubled bottom line. Essential categories of the people have ceased to be recognized in the high and distant figure of the President of the Republic, which seriously destabilizes the institutions of the Fifth Republic and thus, trust in the security forces and bodies or the public function itself. A state of affairs that causes, at the same time, the rise of French populism, the longest lasting (for twenty years it has conditioned political life) and important in Europe.

The symptoms are visible in the

yellow vests

, in the popular classes that exponentially reinforce the positions of the extreme right represented by the National Front, now called the National Regrouping, of Marine Le Pen, the desperate social climate in some suburbs, the controversial government management of the pandemic, the manifest and worrying right-wing movement of broad sectors of the French intelligentsia. Five years after the president's victory in 2017, this balance is not particularly encouraging.

The slap, an irreverent act par excellence when addressed to a president, nevertheless offers a rebellious resonance to the almost disappearance of the large traditional parties and questions about the void of a shared common project. Because, in reality, Macron's main failure lies in his inability to build a hegemonic party that allows filling these essential gaps and establishing himself solidly in the people. He has governed relying on financial elites and weak sectors of the right and the left, without being able to stop the decomposition of the political system or establish a true relationship of trust with the

deep

people.

. If he wants to win the presidential elections in 2022, he will have to propose a program that can generate a political alternative to the climate of pessimism and malaise, and redirect questions and answers to popular aspirations. That is, to appease and neutralize the speeches that today feed the French extreme right.

Source: elparis

All news articles on 2021-06-22

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