Emmanuel Macron will launch on September 8 the National Council for Refoundation (CNR), a dialogue body imagined by the Head of State to reform the school or the hospital. Problem: an important personality will not go, it is Gérard Larcher, the president of the Senate, third character of the State in the protocol order. According to our information, this is what he wrote to President Macron in a letter sent to the Élysée on Friday, which we learned of, where the President of the Senate explains in short that he does not believe in this CNR, that it is not with this new assembly that we will be able to renovate democracy. A letter which formalizes a position that Gérard Larcher had already held in private, this summer, during a bilateral meeting with the President.
Info FranceInfo > CNR: Gérard Larcher’s letter to Emmanuel Macron in which he warns: “I will not participate in this meeting of September 8” #CNR #thepoliticalbrief @franceinfo pic.twitter.com/1iOcruGjor
— Jean-Rémi Baudot (@jrbaudot) August 29, 2022
Gérard Larcher’s position is widely shared in the Senate where several heavyweights see the CNR as a “Bypassing Parliament”. A relative of Emmanuel Macron told us that the CNR is the object of “sneers” in the Senate when the subject is discussed in the hemicycle by the government.
This refusal of Gérard Larcher does not seal the fate of the CNR. “It doesn’t matter if Larcher does the empty chair policy,” plays down a member of the government team. But where this CNR was to be a forum for dialogue to “share constraints and responsibilities” (formula used at Matignon), it seems for the moment that the executive is struggling to broaden its interlocutors. Within the majority, we know that neither La France Insoumise nor the National Rally will play the game. But if the right also steps back, there will not be many people left to dialogue beyond the unions and employers.
Symbolically, it is therefore a blow for the project of Emmanuel Macron. This National Council for Refoundation seems off to a bad start, at D-10, and it is not wrong to say that for the moment, this is not clear, even within the executive. The only certainty is that Emmanuel Macron will inaugurate the CNR on September 8. Then there will be thematic CNRs in each ministry… but that’s about all. At Matignon, we do not know what the role of Elisabeth Borne will be during this sequence, the ministers are also waiting.
So there are ten days left. At the Elysée, we try to reassure ourselves by recalling that no one, including in the entourage of the head of state, believed at the time in the “Great debate” imposed by Emmanuel Macron himself. They ask everyone to be patient.