“The dissolution of the National Assembly and early elections have so far caused greater divisions in the National Assembly than solutions for the French people, producing more instability than calm,” confessed Emmanuel Macron. It was a rather unusual sight for the French to hear their president speak of a mea culpa in his New Year’s message.

Emmanuel Macron has regretted his decision to call early elections after his party’s heartbreaking European election result, which ultimately led to a political stalemate, an inability to pass a budget, a deterioration of the French economy and growing popular discontent with him and politics. situation in the country.

A half repentance

What the French president left behind was whether he considers his later choices to be wrong as well, that is, the attempt to form a government that did not essentially correspond to the results of the elections and that relied in vain on the hope that it would succeed in breaking the Popular Front of the Left.

But the most worrying thing was that once again the ambitious reformer did not explain how he imagines the next steps to overcome the current situation in France. His description of the next day was again like an exposition of ideas, full of nice words about “collective recovery” and “stability”, some doses of classical patriotism, but also the necessary complement of a philological Europeanism.

Words are cheap

“We need a European awakening, a scientific, intellectual, technological, industrial awakening, an agricultural, energy and ecological awakening,” Macron said and repeated what has become candy in the mouth of European politicians, liberals, center-right, but also center-left. “Reforms, simpler procedures, more investments”. But the difficulty of all these lofty goals lies not in adopting them, but in “how” they are to be achieved.

The invocation of “Europeanism” that the French politician with a banking past has bet on since his very first term has proven to be unable to be the glue, in a society deeply divided and threatened by the challenges and crises of the global economy. Mr. Macron cannot help but remember that it was once the French who put a tombstone on the ambitious plans for a “European Constitution”. It is not possible that he did not register the large rural mobilizations that are directed mainly against the policies of the European Union. And of course he cannot be unaware that almost one in three of his compatriots consistently votes for Marine Le Pen’s far-right National Alarm.

A failed recipe

The attempt to connect the “healthy patriotism” of the French with their “European primacy” as an operation to save a shrinking centrist space and as an antidote to the strengthening of the two extremes does not bear fruit, but the tenant of the Champs-Élysées Palace insists that this is the solution for his country. The choice of François Bairou for the post of prime minister reflects exactly this illusion. The view that a politician bearing the label of the Center will be able to act like a magnet, to attract forces from both his right and his left. Wanted to create a consensus, which will absorb the social upheavals. The indications so far point to the assessment that this plan will collapse, just as the “Barnier experiment” collapsed.

Polishing the surface

In essence, this “close knowledge” that the French president wanted to promote as his new narrative is lacking, if not false. What he seems to have no regrets about and which instead continues to characterize his actions is the belief that everything can be dealt with by a communicative polishing of its surface. Macron is ultimately discredited by society not because he chooses right or left solutions, but because in essence he always tries to avoid giving solutions, knowing how painful this can be.

The French writer Marion Messina describes in her novel, which was translated into German under the title Die Entblößten (translated The Exposed or the Undressed), a dystopian France of the not-too-distant future, where contrasts peak, large parts of the middle class are impoverished and finally the power finds as the only means for its salvation an authoritarianism on the borders of a dictatorship. In its exaggeration, the book has elements that are not far from the reality of today’s France.