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).
FIGAROVOX. - Emmanuel Macron has still not announced his candidacy for the presidential election. His competitors are getting impatient and point to his refusal to debate. Could this harm him in public opinion?
Arnaud BENEDETTI. -
He obviously wants to step over the 1st Round, to win without really competing against the patrol of his challengers.
It's a bit like the America's Cup, this sailing race where the winner of the previous event only enters the competition when it comes to meeting in the final the other competitors who have disputed the right...and the honor of facing the defending champion.
He intends to keep his resource of "presidentiality" which gives him in immediate perceptions a comparative advantage, potentially at least, vis-à-vis his competitors.
His interest, in view of the polls which place him comfortably at the top of voting intentions,
Emmanuel Macron's strategy offers an angle of attack to opponents to distill a discourse of suspicion which can prove to be corrosive in the depths of opinions of distrust of institutions.
Arnaud Benedetti
Basically, this strategy poses two minimum problems: firstly, it creates a distortion of competition between the incumbent in overhang and the others, immersed in the bubbling cauldron of the struggle to gain legitimacy, not to mention the problems of confusion between roles between the presidential statute and the statute of the candidate, whose tightness is also formal, force is to note it, that that of the little red riding hood and the big bad wolf;
but it may turn out to be counterproductive in the long term precisely because it lacks transparency, which offers opponents an angle of attack to distill a discourse of suspicion which may prove to be corrosive to the depths of opinions in defiance of against institutions.
How is this situation unprecedented in the history of the Fifth Republic for an outgoing president?
In fact, it adopts a strategy prior to the emergence of the new media ecosystem, with news channels, networks, electoral debates which now bring together all the candidates.
It is true that today there is something like a void in communicating case law.
It was in 2017 that the first major debates confronting the competitors were organized, but at the time François Hollande decided to throw in the towel.
2022 from this point of view constitutes an unprecedented situation where the outgoing must in some way fix the "doctrine", except that it is "his" doctrine to him and only to him, which can in no case do office of iron law.
All things considered, Macron is somewhat in the situation of General de Gaulle in 1965 - obviously less of the trajectory.
He had to deal with a new format of communication: the founder of the Fifth Republic with television, the "walker" with this agora of televised debate from the first round... Note that the General had ended up after his tie up by accepting in the second turn to lend themselves to the exercise of the televised interview;
Emmanuel Macron by saying that he refuses to debate in the configuration involving all the other candidates certainly intends to preserve his presidential Aventin but he takes the risk of not accepting the rules of a democratic competition in a country where we love monarchs do well, provided they demonstrate a proven sense of equality.
the "walker" with this agora of televised debate from the first round... Note that the General had ended up after his tie-up by accepting in the second round to lend himself to the exercise of the televised interview;
Emmanuel Macron by saying that he refuses to debate in the configuration involving all the other candidates certainly intends to preserve his presidential Aventin but he takes the risk of not accepting the rules of a democratic competition in a country where we love monarchs do well, provided they demonstrate a proven sense of equality.
Read alsoPresidential: where were we at 100 days from the first round?
Macron's problem is that he is too young on the one hand to allow himself a positioning à la Mitterrand or de Gaulle, weathered as they were by the biting winds of history and that on the other hand he is confronted with the test of the coherence of the modernity that he claims to carry in a less indulgent world with the marks of a power in majesty.
Will he really win by stepping into the political arena?
Certainly... But by not going there, he also takes the risk of being the one who shirks, who uses and abuses his status to further distort competition, to ultimately "snatch" the mother election, founder of French public life. It obviously plays on the decline of politicization, the tendency to withdrawal and civic indifference, to the victory of the freedom of the "moderns" over that of the "old", on the fragmentation of political offers which hollowly feeds the belly macronism whose solidity is socially, in appearance, invigorating. To think that communication is what saves is a mistake; it is a bigger mistake today than yesterday, even if we must not underestimate the alienating poisons of communicating stratagems.
Can the democratic arena be satisfied with a President who dodges the debate in the first round?
I do not think so.
Arnaud Benedetti
Can the democratic arena be satisfied with a President who dodges the debate in the first round? I do not think so. Can the public accept it? No doubt this is the bet of the outgoing who thinks that his art of dodging will be hailed as a tactical feat, as if this were the cardinal criterion for measuring his credibility to occupy the position, as if it was enough to to be an outstanding tactician in order to be legitimate. This reading, which is often that of commentators, must obviously be taken into account in that it is part of a form of internal and electoral realpolitik. It nevertheless remains a partial diversion of the rules of the democratic game which requires that the moment of truth constituted by the election of the President by universal suffrage be the same for all,even if the Head of State would take a risk for his re-election.