It is a delicate mission that he has set himself. During his speech to the French, on April 17, Emmanuel Macron gave himself “one hundred days of appeasement, unity, ambition and action in the service of France” to relaunch his five-year term. Stuck in the crisis caused by his pension reform, the head of state then set a course to try to ease tensions in the country.
A month later, the goal is far from being reached. The political crisis remains in the National Assembly and social tension does not weaken. But is the President of the Republic really doing everything to “appease” France?
“Appeasement is a hundred days of recovery”
For Emmanuel Macron, this appeasement seems above all to go through a return to the stage. After months of discretion, Emmanuel Macron has thus chosen to saturate the media space. Notably recently, with four interviews in the space of six days, in the Parisian, opinion, Challenges, or the TF1 newscast on Monday evening. With always the same watchword: “We are moving forward and there is a determination […], the country continues to create” wealth, he said during his television interview, insisting on lowering the cost of labor to attract investors. “Even when there are disputes, we don’t change, we don’t do not head to tail, ”he pleaded.
At the same time, the president struggled on the ground, as if to add a physical dimension to this strategy. A rowdy walkabout in Alsace, a market in the Jura, a vocational high school in Charente-Maritime, a factory in the North to promote reindustrialisation, a visit to the Institut Curie in Saint-Cloud… “Is there has a form of incomprehension of the president with the French? Yes. Is it a fatality? No. Appeasement cannot be decreed. It works and that’s what we do, “sweeps Prisca Thevenot, deputy for Hauts-de-Seine and Renaissance spokesperson.
This displayed desire for appeasement after a crisis is not new to the Elysée. The President of the Republic had already mentioned it after the sequence of “yellow vests” or after the period of confinement linked to Covid-19. “I don’t know if the word appeasement is appropriate here. The hundred days of appeasement are actually one hundred days of revival. The president shows that he has lost none of his desire to reform ”, abounds François Patriat, the boss of the Macronist senators. “Okay, he is unloved and criticized, but he is on all fronts and does the job like no one else,” he said.
“The hundred days are only a provocation! »
Rather than appease the country, Emmanuel Macron has therefore above all taken control of the media agenda, promising the “acceleration” of reforms and multiplying budget announcements targeted at teachers or the middle classes. In recent weeks, the Head of State has not really taken gloves to discuss the social mobilization still underway, with a new day of demonstrations scheduled for June 6. “The pots and eggs are for cooking,” he joked during a hectic trip at the end of April. “All those who contribute to the denial of reality [sur les retraites] are preparing for the arrival of the extremes,” he added on Sunday in I’Opinion. Small sentences, or his nod to his declaration on “work around the corner”, which did not fail to annoy his opponents.
“The President of the Republic had given himself a hundred days to appease [la] anger [des Français], immense anger. He was once again in denial of this reality. The hundred days are only a provocation! “, rebuked the communist deputy Jean Chassaigne in the Assembly on Tuesday. “He shows up a lot, he is very talkative but talks to himself. He remains the president of contempt, who always finds a way to humiliate all those who may be against him, ”added his PCF colleague Sébastien Jumel.
The interested party took care to sweep away this image of “contempt” during his interview Monday evening on TF1, defending his activity in contact with the French. Despite these “efforts” to appease, an elected official close to the president finally, a very personal explanation: “For some French people, the president is too brilliant, too know-it-all, too assertive. What is sometimes taken as arrogance is a superiority of spirit”.