It was an hour into his television appearance on Sunday night before President Emmanuel Macron summed up the main thrust of his message, using a rhetorical device to make his point. “You said 'he won't be elected without a party', it happened; you said 'he won't get a hearing abroad' and it happened, we're being listened to; you said 'there won't be a [Parliamentary] majority'; we have a large, [gender] balanced, modernised majority; you said 'the first reforms won't take place, the people will be in the streets' and they've been carried out.”
The “you” that the 39-year-old president used on his Sunday night television appearance on the TF1 television channel naturally referred to the journalists questioning him. Since his election in May President Macron has largely refused to speak to them, because, as he said on Sunday, he has “taken the decision not to have a gossipy presidency”. But the audience the president really wanted to address in his long-awaited television interview was the sceptical French public.
Macron is currently under fire from an opposition that is small in number but very active in the National Assembly, being attacked over the way he is using government decrees to implement changes in employment law, losing popularity in opinion polls, being accused of showing disdain for the weakest in society through various comments that have sparked rows (he has spoken about “idlers”, “those who are nothing” and people who “create bloody chaos”) and is suspected of favouring the rich. So in his TV interview he wanted to demonstrate that he was holding the line and steering the course he had originally set himself: “I'm doing what I said!”

President Macron chose to make this TV appearance now because he is convinced that this is a strategically important moment in his presidency. His legitimacy had come under attack since his election because of the high number of abstentions in the second round of voting while his main opponent, Jean-Luc Mélenchon from the radical left La France Insoumise ('France Unbowed'), has brandished the legitimacy of street protest to oppose him. With a series of planned demonstrations beckoning in which the French public was called on to “surge” upon Paris in their opposition, the autumn was supposed to heap pressure on the presidency. La France Insoumise meanwhile claimed it was prepared to take on the “highest responsibilities” in the land.
Yet though there was significant discontent the scale of protests did not reach those seen in 2006 or 1995 under President Jacques Chirac. It was at this moment that Emmanuel Macron chose to break his audio-visual silence and agree to a television interview. It was his way of saying: “Here I am and here I'm staying.” That was the key message from his appearance, with the rest of it largely consisting of a reminder of the difficult issues that have arisen over the summer and some instructional messages about policy initiatives to come: on training, apprentices and unemployment benefit.
'You didn't understand me'
That was the main theme of the president during the long section of the interview in which he discussed the summer's controversies. As regards his choice of language, the president defended the right to express himself how he wanted, even on occasions like one of the dialogues written by celebrated French screenwriter and film-maker Michel Audiard. He also fended off criticism – as his entourage had already done - that he was “disdainful” of certain classes. Macron said that when he used the word “idlers” he was referring not to French people in general but people who “get mixed up with activists” in order to try to get redundancy payments above the legal norm. Then, after becoming caught up in his own complex arguments, President Macron finished with that well-worn explanation: “When you take things out of context, the word out from the speech, you can make someone say anything.” In short, when it comes to semantics it is still other people's fault.
Answering claims that he is the “president of the rich” Emmanuel Macron again insisted he had been misunderstood. He refused to draw a dividing line between the wealthy and other people, insisted that he did not believe that “French jealousy” of the rich existed though proceeded to speak about it four times, and then put forward a new concept about the better-off. He preferred to see them, he said, as the “first in the rope team” and came up with a mountaineering version of the well-known trickle down effect theory in economics: “If you start to throw stones at them the whole rope team falls,” Macron said.
The president also defended himself against charges that he has been tough on the weakest in society. He justified the pending increase in the CSG – a tax used to top up the social security budget – saying that 80% of pensioners will not be worse off because of it, and that in the long term, thanks to a massive reduction in local council taxes, no one would be out of pocket by a single cent. Macron pursued a similar line of argument on housing, saying that he was seeking a reduction in rents which would counterbalance the planned cut in housing benefit.
Emmanuel Macron went into long detail about the issues that had dogged the government this summer. But there was nothing said on other burning issues, such as talk of a ban on the weedkiller glyphosate, the EU trade deal with Canada known as CETA, energy transition and rumours (since denied) that high-profile environment minister Nicolas Hulot was to resign, or on the future of the highly-controversial plans for an airport at Notre-Dame-des-Landes near Nantes in western France.
For more than half-an-hour President Macron sought to bring chapter one of his presidency to a close, by rejecting the image of a president who favours the rich. Once he had set the record straight – not to the delight of everyone – he then moved to the second phase of his presidency, with a promise that was never explicit but which lay behind each proposition – that of being a president for all.
'It's a plan to reward work'
Facing accusations that he has offered handouts to people who don't need them, the president confirmed that he was introducing initiatives aimed at French people who are currently struggling. These include life-long learning, into which initiative fifteen billion euros will be invested and which will be aimed at people without a job, apprenticeships in trades where there are secure jobs, and an option for people who have quit their job to still get unemployment benefit.
Though there was nothing new in these “announcements” they were intended to show a social dimension to the president's approach. After six months in which the man who promised he was neither of the Right nor the Left had seemed to choose instead the path of being neither of the Left or the Left, the president wanted to correct things. After the year of “flexibility” which has given firms more room for manoeuvre in terms of hiring and firing, it will be time to provide greater security for workers and to put more money in their pockets.
This desire to balance the picture lay behind one of the few genuinely new announcements of the interview when the president promised that legislation on workers' profit-sharing would be discussed in 2018. This idea was once championed by President Charles De Gaulle to allow employees to share in the profits of their companies.
On the issues of security and terrorism the president also said the government would take “tougher” measures following the recent knife attack in Marseille involving a man from Tunisia who had been detained for shoplifting but then released by French authorities. Though there will be no new legislation. “....Any men and women who, as illegal immigrants, commit a criminal act, whatever it might be, will be expelled,” he said. This decision was immediately criticised by David Rachline, in charge of communications at the far-right Front national, who said: “In terms of security, [the interview] is a completely blank. We have to expel illegal immigrants rather than wait for them to carry out an attack!”
'Results in a year-and-a-half to two years'
Emmanuel Macron played for time on a number of issues, by effectively delegating future decisions to various consultation bodies. So in relation to further employment issues he hoped for workplace agreements between management and staff, hoped that housing association would agree to reduce rents, and wanted an agreement to reorganise the police with the creation of a police unit to look after “day to day security”, whose priority would be to tackle harassment, especially on public transport. On the issue of assisted reproduction being open to all women, the president committed himself to a debate but not one which would “attack [the] convictions” of others.
This last point was clearly a dig at his predecessor President François Hollande, whom Macron implicitly accused of having forced through the law on same-sex marriage. Indeed President Macron aimed a number of such veiled criticisms at his predecessor during the interview, as if the new president wanted to distance himself from the man for whom he was first a senior advisor and then a minister. It is hard to think Macron was not referring to Hollande when he spoke about not wanting a “gossipy presidency” - the socialist president was well-known for his constant chats with journalists. And when Macron spoke about his view that you “don't judge a president by one indicator” it seemed clear that this was a reference to Hollande's much-vaunted pledge to “reverse the trend” of the rise in unemployment.
When it came to results, Macron sought to buy himself some space and time. Reassured by the fact that the autumn's social protests have not turned into a major threat, he feels strengthened in his own legitimacy and doesn't want to take the short-term approach adopted by Hollande. However, he knows that having brought in quite major reforms such as the changes in employment law, he now has to produce concrete results. When his interviewers pressed him to put a timetable on these results, President Macron finally said: “You will see the fulfilment of the reforms and their effects on unemployment in a year-and-a-half, two years.” Or to put it another way: “Be patient.”
The immediate response from La France Insoumise MP Adrien Quatennens was: “I don't know if five years is enough for Macron to break everything. On the other hand, I think that after five months the French people have had enough.”
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- The French version of this article can be found here.
English version by Michael Streeter