President Macron's trio of thorny problems as new political year begins

TheThe education minister Jean-Michel Blanquer has a big plan for the start of the new academic year on Monday 4 September; at his suggestion, pupils in secondary and primary schools up and down the country will be greeted with songs and music. The Ministry of Education says it will be a happy, positive and motivating experience for the youngsters who will, it hopes, be joined in the fun by teachers, parents and headteachers alike.

President Emmanuel Macron seems to wants to pre-empt his education minister. For after a weekend when the radical left, greens and Right all held conferences to mark the start of the post-holiday political year, the government has been out in force singing the praises of its own policies.

But the strains of 'Ode to Joy' that accompanied Macron's first steps as newly-elected president at the Louvre in Paris on May 7th have now definitively faded away. After the upbeat tones of Beethoven, now that the Macron mirage rapidly is dissipating the mood music now feels more like that well-known 1930s song 'Je ne suis pas bien portant' ('I'm not feeling too good') by French actor Gaston Ouvrard. Gone are the De Gaulle-like postures, the talk of France “finding its voice again” in the world and the macho handshakes with Donald Trump. In their place are the grind of daily politics, its limitations, its pitfalls, its reforms and budget calculations. In their place, too, are the social realities of a divided country, something highlighted by the mass unemployment figures: in July the jobless total rose by 35,000 and according to the employment agency Pôle Emploi across all social categories there are now six million people without work in France.

The euphoria that gripped the presidency at the beginning has come to an end. President Macron is now faced with three major difficulties: an economic policy that is clearly right-wing; unpopular measures; and a spectacular absence of effective political representatives capable of explaining and getting across what the government is doing.

This explains the president's sudden change of approach. Speaking in Berlin on May 15th Macron sidestepped a journalist's question by saying he had decided he would never speak on domestic politics while he was abroad. Last Wednesday and Thursday, August 23rd and 24th, he did the exact opposite during a visit to Eastern Europe, with the arguments he deployed displaying a certain anxiety on his part.

'France is not a reformable country, French men and women hate reforms...as a people they hate that. They have to be told where we're heading, and they have to be asked to carry out fundamental change,' he said in Bucharest on August 24th. 'France has once more become a society of status,' he said.

The idea that France is stuck in the status quo and the income that comes from status and vested interests is an old refrain which was, for example, used a great deal by current Bordeaux mayor Alain Juppé in 1995 when he was prime minister and had to back down in the face of social protests over his planned reforms. It is a classic argument of the Right, which has always explained its difficulties in carrying out 'reforms' – the 'structural reforms' that neo-liberals so crave - by some nebulous irredeemable Gallic characteristic!

Now it is Emmanuel Macron's turn to highlight this point. But he has held back from commenting on, correcting or giving any signs on what now constitutes his main political problem: the fact that his policies and economic decisions are right-wing. These include the virtual abolition of the wealth tax, a reduction in tax on investment income, a reduction in housing benefit, a cut in budgets (of universities, health and defence), a restriction on or end of government-backed job contracts – particularly those aimed at getting young people into work – and the increase in the CSG (a supplementary tax to help fund the social security budget) partially offset by a reduction in workers' social contributions. On top of these budgetary decisions, which help the well-off and hit the least well-off as well as ordinary working people, there are the government decrees that will reform workplace employment law to offer greater “flexibility” - for which read even more insecurity for employees – and a major change in unemployment benefit provision.

Macron's election mantra about being “of the Left and Right” vanished once the government made its first political and economic decisions. This has not just led to warnings from Macron's predecessor President François Hollande, there have also been questions raised inside the president's own political camp. A key ally François Bayrou, leader of the centrist MoDem party, told Le Point of his concerns about the “atmosphere created by the increase in the CSG and, at the same time, some tax breaks for the better-off”. He considered that these policies had “angered a section of pensioners and public servants”. Bayrou, who was briefly justice minister under Macron before having to stand down over a party funding controversy, was overtly critical of the government: “Public opinion can't clearly see the direction, the goal that's been fixed.”

Alain Juppé, who has come out of his retirement from national politics, and whose former right-hand man Édouard Philippe is today the prime minster, says it is now clear that 'Macronism' is nothing more than communications “froth”. Yet the Right in general can be content in the knowledge that some of its own – the prime minster, economy minister Bruno Le Maire and budget minister Gérald Darmanin – are in charge of the new government's economic policy. They can also take pleasure from noting that up to now there has been no gesture, no measure put in place, aimed at the centre-left or socialist voters who elected Emmanuel Macron.

Public relations breakdown, political weakness

For this is today Emmanuel Macron's problem: he won power through the centre and he is exercising it from the Right, not unlike 1970s centre-right president Valéry Giscard d'Estaing. In doing so he is erasing all the promises of renewal, political innovation and solidarity that a large section of his electorate had believed in. The budget drawn up by budget minister Gérald Darmanin, which was thrown together rather than being a real collective exercise that could have given it some political perspective, ended up raising hopes that were then replaced by a policy of austerity that the government did not even openly acknowledge. In the same way, the method in which Macron's new party La République En March (LREM) was tied up in rules and statutes smacks of the very old-style politics that the new president had promised to do away with.

Faced with these first difficulties, the head of state came up with another old argument. After the claim that France was “unreformable”, President Macron insisted that the problem was a lack of explanation. “We must explain where we're heading,” the president said on his trip to Romania. Inside the Élysée aides to the president are already beginning to worry about the inability to explain, trumpet and sell to the public the high-profile new law on cleaning up behaviour in public life. Meanwhile the first session of the new Parliament showed that while the LREM is dominant numerically it is politically weak, and allowed Members of Parliament from the radical left La France Insoumise ('Unbowed France') to make the running and dominant the agenda.

General De Gaulle was able to stay aloof from the political fray in the Élysée because he could rely on a party of loyal veterans (the Union for the New Republic or UNR), a strong prime minister in Georges Pompidou and some confrontational Parliamentarians such as Alexandre Sanguinetti. After his stately march towards power, Emmanuel Macron has discovered its solitary nature. Around him, allies have made gaffes. Budget minister Darmanin went to absurd levels to defend the cut in students' housing benefit, even calling for landlords to lower their rents. Before him there was the spectacle of MP Claire O'Petit, who was in the Socialist Party, then the centre-right UDF, then MoDem and most recently LREM, trying to explain away the size of the housing benefit cut. “If at the age of 20 or 24 you start crying because they're taking five euros from you, what are you going to make of your life?” she wondered. It was a kind of remixed version of a comment by veteran French public relations consultant Jacques Séguéla who once said: “If you haven't got a Rolex by the time you're 50, your life's been a failure.”

Then there was prime minister Édouard Philippe who was sent out on an urgent mission to inform the public via the BFM TV news channel only for him, too, to stumble, not knowing how to respond to some of the questions from veteran interviewer Jean-Jacques Bourdin. In June the prime minister happily described his role as that of someone who would meticulously carry out the president's policies. However, Philippe is not a chief of staff or a “co-worker” as President Nicolas Sarkozy once described his premier François Fillon, but the head of the government, and therefore in charge of explaining what is at stake in the government's plan of action, its timetable and the reasons for the reforms. So far Édouard Philippe has not managed to achieve this, which has left President Macron a little further exposed.

This explains the return of the presidential voice and some indiscretions, too. In Austria and Romania the head of state met some journalists for an off-the-record briefing, a practice Macron promised he would not indulge in after the endless chatter that came from François Hollande. It was announced that the Élysée's communication strategy would be changing. The president himself would speak soon and, if it went well, would speak more often in the future. Indeed, Emmanuel Macron, we learnt, was considering making regular public comments, perhaps once or twice a month, possibly on the radio.

One earlier example was under General De Gaulle, who as president was regularly interviewed by his favourite interviewer Michel Droit. Laurent Fabius who became “France's youngest prime minister” also tried a similar exercise in 1984 and 1985, through a weekly interview with journalist Jean Lanzin on TF1 television. It was called 'Parlons France' ('Let's speak of France') and this form of propaganda was so quickly ridiculed and forgotten that it was unable to stop the socialist government's defeat at the ballot box in 1986.

In Emmanuel Macron's case the argument about a failure in communications and a prime minister who cannot shake off his image of grey, elitist technocrat masks a more serious political problem: that of this government's political weakness and the fragility of its base support. Where are the heavyweights, where are the big name voices, who are the people who are going to get across the presidential plan in something other than technocratic newspeak? Who is there who can, right now, transform a dynamic electoral victory into an organised political force?

September protests

Never has a government been so absent from public debate, with ministers – with the exception of Jean-Michel Blanquer at education – either silent or limiting themselves to narrow departmental explanations. The working status of all employees is about to be turned upside down and yet the minister of employment, Muriel Pénicaud, has not given a long interview or agreed to a debate on the content of the decrees that will reform employment law. Have we heard from the defence minister, despite the defence budget cuts and the removal of the chief-of-staff of France’s armed forces, General Pierre de Villiers, the presidency's first crisis? Do we know what the culture minister or the minister charge of digital affairs are up to? Does the agriculture minister have a plan?

In the same way the first session of the new French Parliament highlighted the absence of effective political figures inside the majority Parliamentary groups, LREM and MoDem. The absences or missteps of the Parliamentary majority group's president Richard Ferrand, who is facing a preliminary investigation over a property affair, have been criticised within his own camp.

Emmanuel Macron's speech (in French) at Bucharest on Thursday 24 August. His defence and explanation of his plans start at 19mins 38secs:

The next Parliamentary session does not start until October 3rd so MPs from the ruling party will perhaps have time to put things in order between now and then. But it is not the pro-Macron Parliament that will be at the forefront of minds in the Élysée at the moment but the social protests that could start from as early as September. The scheduled demonstration on September 12th, which was initially just called by the CGT trade union against the use of government decrees to reform employment law and the content of the reforms themselves, could take on a completely different dimension given the other unpopular measures that have been announced. The university term starts at the beginning of September and the unknown reaction of students is always a threat for any government.

The other key date is September 23rd, with the planned “popular gathering against the social coup d'état” called by La France Insoumise and its presidential candidate Jean-Luc Mélenchon. “We hope there are tens of thousands of people in the street of Paris, from right across France,” said Manuel Bompard, one of the of the movement's leaders, on Friday August 25th as members gathered in Marseille for a conference. The movement wants to turn this protest day into a “national test”. Between now and then, says the Élysée, the President of the Republic will have spoken to the country. Emmanuel Macron will himself then be able to test what weight the presidential word still carries.

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• The French version of this article can be found here.

English version by Michael Streeter