Arnaud Benedetti: "The macronie has not learned since the yellow vests"

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.

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Is it the surprise effect of the weekend demonstrations against the extension of the health pass? The words of the young government spokesperson attacking a "

" to disqualify opponents of executive measures show obvious annoyance against an opinion that cannot be reduced sometimes controversial and questionable survey projections.

"Griveaux, get out of this body ...", could we, without laughing or almost, object to a Secretary of State who thus distils an expression which is not without evoking the arrogance of his predecessor denouncing vests behind France yellow “

”. Gabriel Attal's words are obviously awkward but they are also the product of intoxication. The embarrassed and quite surprising silence of most of the oppositions encumbered in a worrying form of "

", as well as the publication of opinion studies, the immediacy of which should however encourage caution, no doubt confirm the executive in the merits of its approach.

The epidemic circumstances offer him a bureaucratic opportunity to put the grip of authority on the back of society.

Arnaud Benedetti

This is obviously forgetting that almost three years ago the power grids were shaking, that Emmanuel Macron in a wan and trembling intervention retreated in the open countryside on his carbon tax project, that the movement was settling in a long anger whose effects are not always dissipated ...

Macronism found in the health crisis the means to exercise a power that it basically exercised sparingly, much more constrained by the globalization of which it was the product and the herald than carried by an energetic voluntarism that, only his communication tried to mimic. The epidemic circumstances offer him a bureaucratic opportunity to put the grip of authority on the neck of society, some would say authoritarianism. The virus that lurks is the school of power for the whole macronie class ... She dares without daring too much, she tries it out with the firmness of words but the prudence of the arm, she nevertheless sometimes seems to revel in it as if it affected this "

evoked by theone of Gracq's characters in

to describe to the touch, almost, this object imbued with mysteries that constitutes the exercise of power.

There is this fascination from the first moment in the meeting between these new "young Turks" and the state.

The surveillance generated by a text which at this stage raises these big questions that a democracy must ask itself before proceeding with its adoption can in no case be considered as an indisputable object.

Arnaud Benedetti

But an opportunity is not enough to make statesmen and women. It also requires discernment, restraint, a sense of "glance", humility which does not exclude the aptitude for the sacred, the awareness of being the depositary of something that is beyond us, and this thickness that only internalization and a humble knowledge of history are able to confer. So many qualities which obviously did not necessarily irrigate the outline of the draft law relating to the extension of the sanitary pass. The surveillance generated by a text which at this stage raises these major questions that a democracy must ask itself before proceeding with its adoption can in no case be considered as an indisputable object, under the pretext of pressing health needs.

Mr. Attal is not only wrong to caricature the critical positions that are manifested against this project, but he betrays the feverishness of his majority and especially this poor assurance which, during the yellow vests crisis, the page of which is far from being turned , leads part of the country into a virtual abyss. Everything happens as if the young Macronie had "

" to use Talleyrand's famous phrase to the address of these emigrants returning under the Restoration. Nothing learned from their mistakes during the weeks of autumn and winter 2019, nothing forgotten about their resentment in the face of fear and the retreat conceded to an unexpected uprising.