The tricolour was still flying in the villages around the commuter belt town of Joigny in celebration of France’s World Cup win. Local supermarkets were still selling celebratory plastic cups and paper napkins featuring Les Bleus. But the feelgood factor has flopped, reports The Guardian.
In Paris, the scandal over the presidential bodyguard Alexandre Benalla’s assault on May Day protesters has shocked and outraged. But Joigny, as locals like to remind visiting Parisians,“is not Paris”.
Three hours from the urban hysteria, here in La France périphérique – the term suggests physical closeness to the capital, but a great psychological distance away – there is anger and profound disappointment.
Political analysts say more than a third of the French electorate was already having doubts about President Emmanuel Macron, whose second-round election victory was boosted by voters’ dislike of his far-right opponent, Marine Le Pen, but were willing to give him a chance. Now he risks losing their support.
In the Yonne département [equivalent to a county] around Joigny, Françoise Hitier, a native of Normandy who retired to the area, is one such disillusioned voter.
“I didn’t vote for Macron or Le Pen, but I was prepared to give him the benefit of the doubt. I didn’t expect this. Now I have lost confidence in him and the government.”
The pensioner is particularly angered by the president’s reaction to the scandal, which with Trump-like gusto Macron dismissed as a storm in a teacup whipped up by the media.
“Does he think we are idiots? Thank goodness we had Le Monde to reveal this affair, otherwise we’d have known nothing about it,” Hitier added. “Instead of playing down this unacceptable violence he should have spoken out straight away. By keeping quiet about it he’s bought himself time to prepare his response and wriggle out of the shenanigans. This isn’t right.”
Benalla’s actions may warrant a shrug from those who remember Charles de Gaulle’s shadowy, mafia-like militia, François Mitterrand’s secret “anti-terrorist” cell and Nicolas Sarkozy’s ”friendship” with Muammar Gaddafi, but Hitier’s is a voice among many. The French have not forgotten Macron’s vow of probity, morality and transparency in French public life.
Instead, the Élysée kept quiet about Benalla for more than two months, prompting accusations of a cover-up. Macron remained silent for a week after the story finally emerged.
“People I’ve spoken to are stupefied by the whole thing,” the political analyst Bruno Cautrès, from the Sciences Po research institute Cevipof, told The Guardian.
“Sometimes it feels like we have gone back to the 1970s. I have studied Macron for two years and I myself am astonished. He is considered a master of communication and yet to make such a serious error. It’s dramatic.”
The Front National made serious inroads in the Yonne during last year’s presidential and legislative elections when disaffected voters branding themselves part of “forgotten France”, shunned mainstream parties. Here, as elsewhere, rumours, fake news and satirical reports quickly take root.