Arnaud Benedetti is an associate professor at Paris-Sorbonne University and editor-in-chief of the
“
Revue Politique et Parlementaire
”.
He published
How Did Politicians Die?
The great malaise of power
(Éditions du Cerf, 2021).
To discover
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LE FIGARO. - The start of the 60th edition of the Agricultural Show was marked by the cancellation of the planned debate between Emmanuel Macron and stakeholders from the agricultural world. What is this quack a symbol of?
Arnaud BENEDETTI. -
The president is reaching the limits of the
“great replacement”
of politics by communication.
The farming world is the one which, for several decades, has been the most exposed to the policy of adaptability that Europe on the one hand and globalization on the other want to impose on numerous economic sectors.
Emmanuel Macron talks about adaptation, they live it and this is already a fundamental distinction.
The hiatus is existential and the artifices of a communication which has no other objective than to highlight the presidential words have no chance of convincing them.
But at the Salon, as is often the case when he is in an impossible situation, Emmanuel Macron wanted to save face.
His idea, which he later denied, of organizing a major debate between farmers and environmental defense organizations, the most radical of which like the Earth Uprisings, says a lot about his psyche.
The Head of State does not start from reality but from his tactical anticipations of the moment, thus thinking of being able to play with one and the other, also against each other, and thus put himself on stage as the one who will arbitrate the contradictions to better to surpass them.
He therefore tried this exercise but this time, he came across a profession, better still a culture, which is confronted in its daily life with the harshness of a profession, with the vagaries of the cycles of nature which are inexorable and very tangible, with unbearable contradictory injunctions enjoining production but increasingly hardening the conditions of this production.
The “imaginary world” of Macronism has no hold on the very real world of the peasant.
And this is why, despite his persistence in thinking that his communication can anesthetize everything, he comes up against an insurmountable obstacle here.
This peasant crisis crystallizes beyond the peasant world alone everything that is antithetical to Macronism.
After the “yellow vest” movement, the President of the Republic organized a “great debate”. After the anger of the farmers, he wanted to organize a debate again. Can round tables help end a crisis or close a political sequence?
There is a profoundly artificial dimension in Macronism.
This is what poses a problem and which risks paying a high price when the time comes.
There are institutions, there are procedures, there are intermediary bodies in a democracy.
Emmanuel Macron weakens all of this through his practice.
Do you know many presidents under the Fifth Republic who wanted a law they initiated to be censored by the Constitutional Council?
However, this is what the current head of state has lent himself to, thus showing an unprecedented casualness with institutional usage.
Likewise when he announces, for a year without having a majority in the National Assembly, initiatives like the “hundred days”, the Saint-Denis meetings, “the big meeting with the French”, everything is done by using communicative artifacts to circumvent the only democratic matrix that the President should be concerned about in a democracy, namely popular sovereignty, which he constantly strives to keep at bay and circumvent.
Faced with the anger of the farmers, he responded with images for television [...] The break with the rural world is now complete.
Arnaud Benedetti
Finally, the intermediary bodies (local or national elected officials, unions, etc.) are in his eyes counter-powers, which in his software means adversaries and not partners.
It recentralizes, it overrides paritarianism, it asphyxiates local, social and now representative democracy.
As it exacerbates divisions and tensions, through an immodesty that is not even concealed, the beam of rupture always works a little harder.
The conditions in which his chaotic visit to the Agricultural Show took place illustrate this.
Faced with the anger of the farmers, he responded with images intended for television, putting himself on stage for the umpteenth time, delivering his elements of language, not to accelerate public action, not to reverse its course, but once again to save time and so that a few media influencers paint a portrait of him as a man who goes out to contact, who has an answer to everything, who masters his files... Macron inspires the media, but he does not resolve, far from it, the problems, even though it opens the way to some measures that could satisfy some of the demands, particularly in terms of cash flow.
However, the media coverage of the Agricultural Show in no way corresponded to the official representation that the president wanted to give.
The break with the rural world is now complete.
“Yellow vests”, Citizens’ Convention on the climate, “great debate” with agricultural unions… Can these new forms of consultation strengthen the democratic bond? Or do they contribute, on the contrary, by calling into question the representative role of Parliament, to weaken our institutions even further?
Emmanuel Macron has a consistency that subverts the institutions of the Republic.
This coherence is the European project in its Brussels envelope, which itself is a lever in the service of globalization.
Hence its permanent reluctance to return to the sovereign consultation of the people.
As reality unravels the doctrine of macronism on most subjects, from the sovereign to the economic via Europe, macronism hardens on the one hand in its practice of power and on the other hand it tries to triangulate by recovering the semantics that it also fought when it formed itself into a neo-progressive force from 2016-2017.
He recovers the words without the remedies.
This is nothing but an ideological disguise to protect the only Euro-globalist horizon in which the presidential project fits.
Parliament being what it has been since 2022, that is to say the receptacle of a France which does not necessarily correspond to the ideal France of Emmanuel Macron, the latter initially used all the tools which were offered to him by the Fifth Republic to constrain national representation.
An Emmanuel Macron taking the risk of dissolving, it is an Emmanuel Macron who could be the first President of the Republic under the Fifth to find himself with a National Assembly without a majority.
The Borne governments corresponded to this phase of repeated use of the 49.3 grapeshot.
With the new Prime Minister, Gabriel Attal, we are entering another phase, because as we progress through the five-year term, the sources of social risks will multiply and make the presidential camp's room for maneuver even more uncertain. and Parliament.
Gabriel Attal has already announced in his general policy speech that few texts will be tabled between now and June.
But after ?
It is extremely difficult in a parliamentary regime, including that of the Fifth Republic, to govern without Parliament, but the parliamentary situation of the executive is such that the threat of a motion of censure has never been so strong.
It is to avoid this that the government did not want to present a collective budget following Bruno Le Maire's announcements on the ten billion savings.
An Emmanuel Macron taking the risk of dissolving, it is an Emmanuel Macron who could be the first President of the Republic under the Fifth to find himself with a National Assembly without a majority.
This institutional blockage would obviously be attributed to him with the consequences that one imagines... Hence the very serious parliamentary problem with which he is confronted and his implicit desire to immediately limit the exposure of his government to the intractable reality of the hemicycle.
The whole question is how to hold on for three years in such a political and social context.
Emmanuel Macron, since he was elected, has not organized a nationwide referendum. Would this tool be more suitable?
It is clear that he is not the only one.
It all started with Nicolas Sarkozy, who erased the results of the 2005 referendum by passing the Lisbon Treaty. The theft of popular sovereignty comes from there.
For a referendum to truly provide democratic breathing space in these times of suffocation, the question asked must still be considered essential for citizens.
Emmanuel Macron had at least two subjects on which we contacted our compatriots.
During the pension reform, a majority of them wanted to be questioned on this issue.
The executive never considered this hypothesis, just as it closed the door on a constitutional modification allowing the people to be consulted on the subject, oh so existential, of immigration to the great relief, it must be remembered , from the left...
By cutting off all avenues of appeal to the people, the President of the Republic signs the reality of his political project: a democracy where the people are confined to the role of spectator.
Arnaud Benedetti
The constitution of the Fifth Republic was intended by its initiator to guarantee in moments of major decision or serious crisis the primacy of popular sovereignty.
For General de Gaulle, everything came from this resourcing at any possible moment.
However, institutional practice for several years now has been to twist this spirit.
Between 49.3 and article 11, Emmanuel Macron chose the first over the second and when he can no longer even shelter behind the first, he will invent a story inventing an ersatz political innovation.
This was the case with citizens' conferences without any legitimacy, but also with other forms even more empty of substance such as "the hundred days" just after the adoption of the text on pensions, the National Council for Refoundation lost in the shifting sands of 2023, the Saint-Denis meetings apparently as vain as the previous one, and the “big meeting with the French” whose emphatic announcement resulted in... a press conference!
The only response which at this stage could still have a strong meaning would be a dissolution but the president, through the prism of his personal interests, certainly does not want to resolve this, the cost of this undoubtedly appearing to him too high.
This prospect does not bode well except a worsening of the political crisis into which the country is sinking.
By cutting off all avenues of appeal to the people, the President of the Republic signs the reality of his political project: a democracy where the people are confined to the role of spectator.
It is the acme of theatrical politics in the service of a Europeanist theology.