The opposition is up in arms, senior figures in the ruling party are once again forced to row to the rescue and a Parliamentary debate on vaccine passports was stopped in its tracks in the middle of the night. It is a good thing, then, that Emmanuel Macron has “learnt” from his past errors, as he stated on December 15th, otherwise goodness only knows what the French president might have said about the unvaccinated barely three weeks later.
“I'm not myself in favour of pissing off the French people, I rail all day long against the state administration when it gets in their way. But the unvaccinated, I'm very keen to piss them off! And so we're going to continue to do that, right to the end. That's the strategy,” he declared in an interview with Le Parisien daily newspaper on Tuesday January 4th, in response to a reader's question. The president went even further, saying that an “irresponsible” person who did not get vaccinated was no longer a citizen in his eyes. They belonged to a “very small minority” who have broken no law but for whom the head of state has nonetheless decided to make life impossible.
At the end of 2019, a year marked by the disruptions of the 'yellow vest' protest movement, Emmanuel Macron had explained that “calming things down must always take precedence over confrontation”. He had added: “Appeasing doesn't mean giving in, but respecting each other in our disagreements.” The “strategy”, a word he still dares to use, he has now chosen to convince French people to get vaccinated is itself a brilliant illustration of the opposite approach.
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The president is putting forward a very curious idea of public health policy or indeed of politics full stop. It is a 'clannish' policy – to use the expression employed by the Paris police chief Didier Lallement – which excludes rather than unites, which is violent rather than calming things down, which irritates rather than carrying people with it. It is a crude rather than a popularizing approach.
The government minister in charge of Parliamentary relations, Marc Fesneau, tried to brush it off as simply “a remark” or even a “life-saving electroshock”. But it is in fact a moral, institutional and political error. For as France's Covid-19 Scientific Council has written “even in an urgent situation, the support of the public is an important condition for the success of the response”. The World Health Organisation (WHO) puts it this way: “Convince rather than constrain.”
But brutality and punishment are the only arguments that Emmanuel Macron has found to handle this health crisis. They highlight the failure of a government which has not stopped zigzagging in its policies or boasting over its achievements. It is a government that calls for “transparency” and “consultation” while taking its decisions behind closed doors at the Conseil de Défense or Defence Council and announcing them at the last minute to preserve the element of surprise. Yes, that is what is still going on.
In the past Macron has referred disparagingly to “people who are nothing” and then given an apparent mea culpa; made a dismissive reference to the French as “Gauls resistant to change” and then uttered an apparent mea culpa; referred to the state handing out “shedloads of dosh” followed by an apparent mea culpa; and told a young jobless man that he could “cross the street” to find work – for which there was no mea culpa. So one might have expected a form of weariness among supporters of the president who have been forced to intervene on his behalf after each linguistic gem produced by their hero. Yet some still have the energy to defend the indefensible.
Faced with the latest linguistic bombshell, and by now well-rehearsed in the exercise, his supporters quickly suggested it was simply“plain speaking” - a classic get-out clause – insisted that the president was showing his determination to save lives, and praised his “political courage”. That was the line taken by former interior minister Christophe Castaner, who is now head of the ruling party La République En Marche group in the National Assembly, when interviewed on BFMTV news channel. When questioned about his mastery – not to say art – of the wounding remark, the president has defended himself by referring to his desire to “break the mould, to shake things up, not to give in to conformism”.
On Tuesday evening Emmanuel Macron's words made headlines around the world, with CNN's Jim Acosta helpfully explaining to viewers that the words “emmerder les non-vaccinés” meant “to piss off the unvaccinated”. At the same time the president's entourage, helped by some zealous commentators, provided the spin by explaining that their hero was simply “descending into the arena to protect the French people”.
The truth is that the head of state needs enemies to carry out his policies. Since the start of his presidency Emmanuel Macron has built his strategy around public opinion, in order to establish a power struggle with opposing forces and divide society. He has targeted railway workers, the various professional, trade and social bodies that help run French society, the “lazy”, the heads of voluntary groups, the press, the opposition, the yellow vest protestors, the unvaccinated and so on. All it takes to earn his wrath is to show disagreement.
Though the president is supposed to be the guarantor of the rule of law in France, all the current head of state talks about is “duties”, which he says “come before rights”. That, at any rate, is his own, very personal, interpretation of the Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen of 1789. He hands out good and bad marks, points the finger at those who, in his view, cannot claim to be citizens, and invents a new way to strip someone of their citizenship. “When my freedom starts to threaten that of others I become irresponsible. An irresponsible person is no longer a citizen,” Emmanuel Macron told Le Parisien.
In the same interview Emmanuel Macron dismissed the idea of imposing a legal obligation to be vaccinated by explaining that he did not want to “force people” or “imprison them and then vaccinate them”. But by withdrawing their citizenship, what is he doing if not depriving millions of French people of their freedom? The question goes way beyond that of the vaccine and the responsibility of those who refuse it. It comes down to our fundamental rights, which have been trampled on for the last five years, initially on the basis that security, defence and republican principles were at stake, and now over the health crisis.
A few months ahead of April's presidential election, the head of state has effectively launched his campaign by diving in head first and adding to the hysteria of a public debate which frankly does not need that. Yet in Le Parisien Emmanuel Macron claimed that he wanted to fight against a “rise in excessive behaviour by adding more reason to the collective debate and fewer negative emotions”. A man who uses provocation like no other is now posing as an arbiter of good behaviour, and attacking a “fascination with conflict, confrontation and sensationalism”. In doing so he is giving a new lease of life to those very people he is claiming to combat.
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- The original French version of this article can be found here.
English version by Michael Streeter