French President Emmanuel Macron ends Friday at midnight his first five-year term marked by strong crises, pending the appointment of his next prime minister, who will be responsible for giving new impetus to the June legislative elections.
Comfortably re-elected on April 24 against his far-right rival Marine Le Pen and invested last Saturday for a second term, President Macron is procrastinating on the announcement of his next head of government to replace the current one, Jean Castex.
The choice is all the more expected as it will confirm or not the orientation that the French president intends to take, who has promised to take into account the anger expressed by many French people during the presidential election and to change of method.
Neither the presidency nor the seat of government gave any indication of when the current head of government would submit his resignation. Nothing, moreover, constitutionally obliges him to leave his post before the start of the second five-year term, Friday at midnight.
But the scenario of a departure at the beginning of next week is taking shape, while the left and far right oppositions are preparing their weapons for the legislative elections of June 12 and 19.
This weekend, Jean Castex must lead the French delegation for the canonization Sunday in the Vatican of the explorer then hermit Charles de Foucauld.
“The resignation will take place on Monday”, believes an official of the presidential majority.
It will then remain to be seen whether his successor will be appointed in the process and in what time frame the new government team will be formed.
Speculation is rife about the profile of this head of government, who in France is responsible for implementing the president’s policy. It would be a priori a woman, according to confidences of relatives of the president.
Emmanuel Macron assured Monday in Berlin that he already knew who would be his next prime minister, endowed, according to him, with a “social”, “ecological” and “productive” profile.
Among the names circulating are the Director General of UNESCO, Audrey Azoulay, the current Minister of Labor, Elisabeth Borne, and the former Socialist Minister of Social Affairs Marisol Touraine.
Reforms
During the week, Emmanuel Macron shared his time between preparing for this second five-year term and numerous calls with foreign leaders, who wanted to congratulate him on his re-election.
After a long exchange on Tuesday with Chinese President Xi Jinping, he notably spoke with the leaders of the African Union, his Ivorian counterpart, Alassane Ouattara, and Iraqi Prime Minister Moustafa Al-Kazimi. Without forgetting the Canadian Prime Minister, Justin Trudeau, with whom he reaffirmed “the attachment to the close coordination that has prevailed since the beginning of the conflict in Ukraine between G7 partners”.
Some are calling on the head of state not to wait too long while the left-wing opposition, united behind the tribune Jean-Luc Mélenchon, takes center stage at the start of the legislative campaign.
The leader of the radical party La France insoumise, who obtained 22% of the vote in the first round of the presidential election on April 10, confirmed Thursday in Marseille (south) that he would not represent himself in these legislative elections, parachuting to his place a faithful, his campaign director Manuel Bompard.
The challenge of the legislative elections for President Macron is to obtain, as is the case now, an absolute majority in the new National Assembly (577 deputies), which would leave him with a free hand to initiate several delicate reforms.
Starting with a major pension reform which pushes back the retirement age and which is highly contested in the country. The president also said he wanted to adopt a series of measures this summer to deal with the unprecedented rise in inflation for decades, which is affecting the portfolio of the French against a backdrop of economic growth at half mast.
All the opinion polls show that purchasing power remains the major concern of the French.
The situation is all the more delicate as the presidential election, also marked by the war in Ukraine, showed a strong rejection of the system and a strong democratic fatigue, which materialized with an almost record rate of 28% of abstentions on polling day.
President Macron’s last five-year term had already been punctuated by crises, from the anti-system protests of the Yellow Vests movement to the COVID-19 pandemic.