Historical parallels, however subtle, can be dangerous. It happened to Emmanuel Macron during the televised address on April 17. The French president set himself the goal of relaunching his second term, after the serious political and social crisis over the pension reform, with new initiatives that must be implemented within a hundred days, just in time for the 14 of July, Bastille Day, the national holiday.
A hundred days? The reference of Napoleon Bonaparte immediately arose among the analysts. After returning from his exile on the island of Elba and regaining power, in March 1815, he lost it definitively, a hundred days later, in the defeat of Waterloo. The emperor would die a prisoner of the English on another island, Saint Helena, in the middle of the Atlantic, six years later.
Macron is not Napoleon, but he is a true republican monarch, with more powers than most heads of state in democracies, thanks to the 1958 Constitution, tailored by General Charles de Gaulle. As of now, however, a year after his re-election, Macron is a beleaguered monarch, with an unpopularity of 72% – according to the latest poll by Le Journal du Dimanche – and without a majority of supporters among deputies to the National Assembly.
The head of the Élysée and his ministers are greeted these days with loud cheers, insults and boos in all their journeys. They are the so-called “welcome committees”, an ironic euphemism. The police are forced to make extravagant deployments. Yesterday it happened again in Vendôme, in the department of Loir and Cher, south of Paris. On Monday, in Lyon, the Minister of Education, Pap Ndiaye, was blocked in a train carriage, at the station, due to a protest, and had to be evacuated by the police. At night, at the Molière theater awards in Paris, the head of Culture, Rima Abdul Malak, also had to face a backlash from the stage and was forced to take the microphone to defend the government management.
Elisi is stuck in a “catharsis operation” to overcome the difficult situation and seek a new consensus. It is about leaving the pension reform behind as soon as possible and moving on to other initiatives, such as improving the labor market, the ecological transition, a more pragmatic regulation of immigration, or institutional reforms to raise the quality democratic
These are good intentions that collide with parliamentary mathematics. The only possible allies, El s Republicans (LR, traditional right), in clear decline in recent years and very divided, fear being completely blurred if they embrace Macron. They offer one-off deals, but not a stable deal.
Despite his wide victory at the polls last year (58.5% of votes against Marine Le Pen’s 41.5%), Macron is haunted by an image of illegitimacy among many French people. It had already happened in his first victory of 2017. Now that impression has been reinforced. They accuse him of forgetting the votes cast by those who only wanted to prevent Le Pen’s victory. These voters are the most irritated. The unease grew even more when he decided not to submit the unpopular pension reform to a parliamentary vote and to approve it by decree. It was the last straw that broke the camel’s back. A grievance in substance and in form.
It has really been more than twenty years since French democracy has been distorted by the weight of the extreme right and the republican front to stop the latter from coming to power. Jean-Marie Le Pen in 2002 led to an exceptional transfer of votes to Jacques Chirac, the then conservative president. The phenomenon was repeated in 2017, in which Macron was the beneficiary against Marine Le Pen. The same in 2022.
Macron is not allowed to run for a third term, but Le Pen could run for the Elysée for a fourth time. For some time, the president and his entourage have been worried about the possibility of leaving the country, as a legacy of the second term, a victory of the far-right candidate in 2027. In an interview on Monday with readers of the newspaper Le Parisien, Macron was asked if he saw it possible to pass the testimony to Le Pen the day he leaves the Elysée. “Marine Le Pen will get there if we don’t know how to respond to the country’s challenges and settle into the habit of lying or denying reality,” he replied.
The current president of the Republic is aware that he must achieve a minimum of successful catharsis, because facilitating the coming to power of the extreme right in France would be a morally very hard final defeat to accept. Not in a hundred days, but in four years, but a real Waterloo.
