Arnaud Benedetti is associate professor at Paris-Sorbonne University. He is editor-in-chief of the political and parliamentary review. He publishes
How are the politicians dead?
- The great malaise of power
(editions of Cerf, November 2021).
What does the communication accident to which the Minister of National Education is the object say, since
Mediapart
revealed the episode of his vacation in Ibiza a few hours before the start of the school year?
Indeed, several lessons can be drawn from this umpteenth political and media eruption. The first, true for almost all eternity, and perhaps even more today than yesterday, is none other than that there is no politician in charge of a State responsibility who does not really belongs, especially in the age of hyper-visibility. It will be surprising that an actor as knowledgeable as Jean-Michel Blanquer did not remember sequences which in the past have cost their initiators very dearly, sometimes involuntary but always harshly sanctioned by public opinion and the media. A minister of health, in the heat of 2003, never recovered from his televised performance in a polo shirt in a summer garden...
The second lesson brings us back to the dramaturgy activated by the executive on the occasion of this health crisis and of which each French person has been the object as well as the witness for almost two years. The call for everyone's responsibility is based on this permanent consideration that we would be going through a moment of exceptional gravity, the President of the Republic having even on the threshold of the epidemic used the war metaphor. Excessive or not, if such is the case, the presentation of the events cannot, on the government side, consequently free itself from the duty of coherence. The minister on vacation in the Balearic Islands, still on vacation less than 24 hours from the start of the school year while concerns continue to grow about the conditions of the latter,obviously tears up this posture of rigor and seriousness that the executive intends to embody in the midst of the Omicron wave.
The Minister will [...] have forgotten the famous lesson of Marc Bloch for whom in times of crisis there is only room for combat posts.
Arnaud Benedetti
The Minister will thus have forgotten the famous lesson of Marc Bloch for whom in times of crisis there is only room for combat positions. Added to this observation is a contextual element that puffs up the wound: Mr. Blanquer's holidays, after the provocative declarations of the Head of State on the "non-vaccinated", reinforce the halo of contempt or casual indifference for the public spirit of a power which would seem in this way to free itself from the adjustment of the individual behavior of its feudatories to the civic virtues which it is claimed to defend and expect from all French people, first of all the non-vaccinated, at the when the crisis is still raging. This hiatus opens up an additional gap in the mistrust that continues to strain relations between society and politics.
But this is undoubtedly the fourth lesson of this new bad buzz.
It reinforces this feeling that macronism both in form and in substance will have unraveled the processes of attempts to moralize public exercise, hypocritical or not, often in front of the rest, for several decades.
Thus, except for the start of the mandate marked by the departure of the Modem ministers, no ministerial official in trouble with the law, for example, will have withdrawn, with the exception of the Minister Delegate for SMEs whose condemnation has sounded the knell of the presence in the government.
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At the same time, any controversy or controversial event will have given rise to this communicating bravado, almost totemic over the entire length of the mandate, of a power that says it always "assumes", for better... and worse!
Everything happens as if this strategy constituted a revolution in itself, but in its astronomical terminology: a return to a previous state of the situation.
Macronism will thus have transported us back to the France of the 60s and 70s. A power not yet impacted by moral requirements, or at least which has not yet internalized them... a power before the time of complexes in a way.
