The executive resorts to the register of dramatization. In terms of gas and electricity, the challenge this winter is to lower or cut. It’s time for “general mobilization”: the Prime Minister unsheathed the expression Thursday, October 6, during the presentation of the energy sobriety plan.
>> Energy sobriety plan: discover the main measures taken by the government
Several ministers have stepped up to the plate, Emmanuel Macron has spoken to entrepreneurs, and the Head of State will even speak next Wednesday on France 2. The government has been stirring up a little more for a little over a month, day after day, this tension strategy. Since, at the end of August, the President decreed the “end of abundance“. With this plan and this battery of measures, we are getting into the hard part!
With this energy sobriety plan, the government wants to monitor the implementation over time. The proof with the government which will return to the French to communicate each week the evolution of our consumption of gas and electricity. Reminds you of something? Obviously, the litany of curves and figures, contaminations or hospitalizations, shelled every Thursday by Jean Castex, Olivier Véran and Jérôme Salomon during the pandemic.
Well, faced with the energy crisis as with the virus, here we are again “at war”, as Emmanuel Macron said. Of course, the risk of a shortage is real, but so is the political strategy. Emmanuel Macron has acquired a taste for managing the country in times of crisis. Keeping it under tension is also a way of trying to build a form of national unity around the executive… But without taking coercive measures. And that’s the limit of the strategy deployed on Thursday 6 October. Ambitious goals, a martial discourse, but only incentives to act, and even bonuses, but no obligations and even fewer sanctions. In any case, not for the moment. The government calls for citizen voluntarism but without wanting to pull out the stick. It’s understandable.
It is also the path he had ended up following over the waves of the Covid, after the initial confinements and prohibitions. The problem is that at the same time, the executive is also working to limit the impact of rising energy prices to help consumers. However, civility is not always enough to convert to sobriety. And that an invoice which flies away is often more effective.