Everything must change so that nothing changes,” says Alain Delon in Cheetah. This is exactly what France has just experienced at the start of the year. Emmanuel Macron had promised “a big meeting with the French”! Failing to know exactly what he intends to promote, we will have heard everything in this orgy of words which has overwhelmed the media for a week.
In the past, a redesign was a 24-hour affair. The Prime Minister submitted his resignation in the morning. His successor was named in the afternoon. In the evening, the secretary general of the Élysée read the list of ministers and, the next day, they participated in their first council. Since the watchwords are “audacity”, “action” and above all “effectiveness”, what took 24 hours requires at least a week.
Logic would have dictated that, faced with the blockage in Parliament, where the president does not have a majority since his re-election in 2022, we would seek out a right-wing personality, an old Republican executive who has seen snow and who knows how to negotiate the difficult compromise required by parliamentary work. Nay! Once again, Emmanuel Macron has chosen to make a “coup”. He will therefore choose his 34-year-old clone, the former Minister of Education Gabriel Attal, who has become the darling of the media. Despite his qualities as a communicator, the one we nickname here the “angel Gabriel” actually has very little experience. But his six months at Education — where, to general approval, he banned the wearing of the abaya in class — propelled him to the top of the polls. The rest doesn’t matter.
Because, in reality, Emmanuel Macron above all chose a heir apparent capable of bypassing all those who already saw themselves as caliph in place of the caliph. What might immediately appear as a shift to the right is first and foremost a partisan strategy. If Attal is far from being the best candidate to unite the country, he is probably the best electoral missile to try to slow down the 29-year-old rising star of the European elections on June 9, the president of the National Rally (RN ), Jordan Bardella.
A reshuffle to counter the RN is the only meaning that we can find in this saga which has a strong smell of the end of the regime. How can we explain that after the leftist Rima Abdul-Malak, Macron made another spectacular “coup” by appointing the rightist and very people Rachida Dati? For the same reason that Gabriel Attal had succeeded the wokist Pap Ndiaye at Education. We could also recall Emmanuel Macron’s proposal to create an international coalition against Hamas before rallying behind that of a banal ceasefire. The French know that their president is like Penelope. What he knits during the day, he unravels during the night. As long as it serves the objectives of the moment.
However, nothing seems more urgent today than countering the RN. Especially since the first opposition force in the National Assembly appears more and more for what it is: a nationalist party with a left-wing economic program, which has no more to do with the far right that Georgia Meloni had anything to do with fascism, even if a certain international press is still looking for the shadow of the black shirts in Piazza Colonna. The very rational philosopher and former minister Luc Ferry was only the last to recognize this by affirming this week that “Marine Le Pen is neither racist nor anti-Semitic”. An obvious fact for a majority of French people, say the polls.
Emmanuel Macron’s performance on Wednesday, in a press conference lasting two hours and 30 minutes in the form of one man show, offered an eloquent portrait of this end-of-regime panic which seems to be affecting the political elites. In 2022, Macron took up the slogan of crypto-Marxist Olivier Besancenot: “Our lives are worth more than their profits. » It was then necessary to convince the left. Here he takes up that of the nationalist conservative Éric Zemmour, “So that France remains France”, from whom he also stole the idea of the return of uniform to school.
“Boldness” first and foremost! But for what purpose? Mystery ! Those who did not yet know it will take it for granted that their president has hardly any qualms on these matters, revealing above all a total absence of convictions. With the exception of just one: “Europe, Europe, Europe”, one of his prestigious predecessors would have said.