Wherever he goes, he is followed by boos and casseroles.
Emmanuel Macron already expected it, after promulgating a pension reform over the weekend that has sparked massive demonstrations and has seven out of 10 French people against it.
But the protests that have surrounded his travels this week through France give an idea of how difficult it will be for him, as he has proposed, to calm the country's spirits within the period that has been given: 100 days.
For the French president, the visits to Alsace on Wednesday and Occitania on Thursday were the first exam after the law that increases the retirement age from 62 to 64 years was published in the Official Gazette on Saturday.
The Élysée Palace wanted to send a signal: the president does not intend to remain confined in Paris and will seek contact with the French.
As a first step to reconnect with the public, Macron announced this Thursday, during a visit to a school in Ganges, a town near Montpellier, a salary increase of between 100 and 230 euros per month for teaching staff in schools and institutes.
The day before, the Minister of the Interior, Gérald Darmanin, announced that motorists who exceed the speed limits by less than 5 kilometers per hour will no longer lose points on their driving licence.
Both measures are popular.
The increase in teachers' salaries is a reiterated demand of the unions.
And one of the reasons for the yellow vest revolt in 2018 was the limitation of the maximum speed on the highway to 80 kilometers per hour.
To calm things down, it will take more, much more.
In Ganges, hundreds of protesters received Macron on Thursday.
The gendarmerie forced some to get rid of their pans.
The Élysée later assured journalists following the president that it was due to a misunderstanding and that the gendarmes had misinterpreted the orders of the prefect, the representative of the state in the provinces.
"The resistance is a bit far away, you can't hear it, but it's there," local deputy for La France Insoumisa, Sébastien Rome, told Macron.
Macron replied: "We can go see her."
Said Rome: "I think they are waiting for you."
Macron added: "If it is only for the eggs and the pans, in my house they are used for cooking."
To a woman who, during an afternoon walk in the municipality of Perols, said: "Macron, resign!", he replied: "I guarantee that I will not resign.
We will have to wait until 2027.
That is the year of the next presidential elections, to which, after being re-elected a year ago, he will not be able to run again.
"The first time you were elected," the woman replied, "I thought you were minimally a Democrat."
Macron stated: “There is a lot of talk about democracy.
Democracy is saying what is going to be done and doing what has been said”.
This exchange summed up a good part of the current political moment in France.
For a part of the country, the president has not acted democratically by imposing the reform by decree, ignoring the massive demonstrations and against the will of the majority of French people.
Some of these French voted for Macron in the second round of the 2022 presidential elections to prevent far-right leader Marine Le Pen from coming to power.
electoral promise
Macron replies that he campaigned on the promise of raising the retirement age.
And that, despite the fact that this was an unpopular measure, no other candidate obtained so many votes, not only in the second round, where a good part of these votes came from the left and were against Le Pen, but also in the first, where it assumes that voters express their genuine preference.
The president argues that the process of adopting the reform is perfectly constitutional and democratic, including recourse to the controversial article 49.3 of the Constitution, which allows the imposition of a law without a parliamentary vote.
The failure of two motions of no confidence against the government of Prime Minister Élisabeth Borne showed that there is no alternative majority in France today.
“Democracy does not live only from the letter of the Constitution, but also from the spirit of the institutions.
There is a spirit of democracy.
The letter is respected but the spirit is violated," said historian Pierre Rosanvallon, one of the most respected intellectual figures in France today, on the popular
TMC television program
Le Quotidien on Monday.
"I am angry, because I think, as a historian, that we are going through, since the conflict of the Algerian war, the most serious democratic crisis that France has ever known."
Macron responded to him on Wednesday during his visit to Alsace: "I respect the intellectual, but I fear that sometimes he becomes a militant."
And he added: "I do not subscribe to it."
The local deputy Patrick Vignal, who accompanied Macron this Thursday in Ganges, assessed: "There were many protesters and we must take this into account, but I have seen the president comfortable."
In a telephone conversation with EL PAÍS, this critical macronista explained: “We must find a solution.
We must respond to inequalities.
There is discomfort and not only because of pensions, but also because of the loss of purchasing power.
To this is added the war in Ukraine and, before, the covid.
I pass for being the ugly duckling [of macronism] and I say that we have lacked humility and modesty.
We must be modest in this period.
And let us remember that we do not have a majority in Parliament.
We have to reinvent ourselves.
I trust the president.
But he still has a long way to go.
It is a challenge".
The analysis at the Élysée is that the pension reform has coincided with a moment of fatigue in French society after the pandemic and inflation.
Before, moments of crisis and prosperity followed one another: now many French people have the feeling that the crises are chained and there is no respite.
The president is confident that the anger will subside and that, after the demonstrations on May 1st, the unions will return to the table to negotiate the future "pact for life at work".
He knows it won't be easy.
On Monday, in a televised speech, Macron said: "We have 100 days ahead of us for calm, unity, ambition and action in the service of France."
The deadline has a practical aspect: in 100 days it is July 14, the national holiday and the day that marks the end of the political term and the beginning of the summer break.
But the 100 days is also a powerful symbol.
They evoke the
Hundred Days
of Franklin D. Roosevelt and the battery of measures against the Great Depression that he launched upon reaching the White House in 1933. There is another reference.
This, French.
These are
Napoleon's
cent days : exiled on the Mediterranean island of Elba, in 1815 he disembarked near Cannes and went up to Paris, where he reconquered the throne.
But the symbol, in this case, is dangerous: the Emperor's 100 days ended with defeat at Waterloo.
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