Old Socialist’s selective quotation introduces the English Reader to this French nonpareil.

Headline: ‘People hate you’: The French are increasingly rejecting Macron

Sub-headline: The French president is omnipresent, despite having pledged to let his prime minister lead the campaign for the upcoming elections. Yet he has never been so unpopular, even within his own camp.

https://www.lemonde.fr/en/politics/article/2024/06/26/people-hate-you-the-french-are-increasingly-rejecting-macron_6675755_5.html

Editor: Even the first paragraph is alive with political melodrama, of the most breathless variety?

This Sunday, June 23, Emmanuel Macron was toying with a new idea, locked away almost every weekend in the Lanterne residence in Versailles. Those who had seen him recently described him as a lion in a cage. Outside the gates of the former hunting lodge, the rejection of the French president was palpable. In a bid to win re-election in the parliamentary elections on June 30 and July 7, MPs from the presidential camp no longer display his face on their campaign posters. “People hate you,” former Renaissance MP Patrick Vignal told him on June 11, when the president called him to find out how his decision, taken two days earlier, to dissolve the Assemblée Nationale, was perceived on the ground. “Emmanuel Macron is like an artist who has gone out of fashion,” said the elected official. Vignal believed the fall from grace was excessive, even if, like most MPs, the former Socialist himself did not understand the president’s action.

Editor: Macron is in fact a dismal failure … the gilets jaunes were the first to realize that Macron, was a Neo-Liberal, bent on turning ‘coddled workers’ into the silent dependents of Capital’s hatred of the lower orders! Macron a graduate of ENA:

Headline: Macron Closes Elite French School in Bid to Diversify Public Service

Sub-headline : The institution had become a symbol of privilege in a society where social mobility has broken down.

Mr. Macron announced on Thursday the closure of ENA, and its replacement by a new Institute of Public Service, or ISP, as part of what he called a “deep revolution in recruitment for public service.”

The decision, one year ahead of a presidential election, is intended to signal Mr. Macron’s determination to democratize opportunity and create a public service that is more transparent and efficient. Earlier this year, he deplored the fact that France’s “social elevator” had broken down and worked “less well than 50 years ago.”

Mr. Macron announced on Thursday the closure of ENA, and its replacement by a new Institute of Public Service, or ISP, as part of what he called a “deep revolution in recruitment for public service.”

The decision, one year ahead of a presidential election, is intended to signal Mr. Macron’s determination to democratize opportunity and create a public service that is more transparent and efficient. Earlier this year, he deplored the fact that France’s “social elevator” had broken down and worked “less well than 50 years ago.”

…

Macron is/was but a pretender, that longed for that World Stage, without the necessary – even the unsophisticated vision of a Thatcher or a Reagan longing for the Revolutionary Moment, that eventuated in the 2008 Catastrophe!

Macron knows he’s misunderstood. On June 21, he recorded a podcast for an entrepreneurs’ website, “Génération Do it Yourself,” defending the rationality of his action for an hour and 45 minutes. The president castigated the political programs of his opponents, “the extremes,” as he labeled them, targeting both the far-right Rassemblement National (RN), on the brink of power, and the left-wing alliance Nouveau Front Populaire (NFP). In his eyes, they will lead “to civil war.” A strong phrase, perhaps too strong? “No comment,” sighed someone at Macron’s Renaissance party campaign HQ, where the president’s public appearances are deemed to be increasingly clumsy.

Macron had pledged to let his prime minister, Gabriel Attal, lead the legislative campaign. But, since June 9, the president has been speaking out every other day. “He’s a man who never loses hope of trying to convince people,” said an Elysée spokesperson. Last Sunday, he wanted to make his voice heard again. But how? According to the Elysée, in a phone conversation with the majority leaders, Macron had been contemplating the idea of writing a “Letter to the French.”

Editor: Reader follow the Subtitles, I’ll assist you by quoting the most flagrant, informative, or even the most melodramatic of these paragraphs. Please post your comments!

When you have nothing to say, should you make it known

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The president’s advisers knew that he was devastated, and they did not try to talk him out of expressing himself, speaking of “impressionistic interventions” which, in their eyes, fit into to the role of a president. It was perhaps a mistake. “The role of a spin doctor is to say things frankly, like a doctor talks to a patient. Communication is a soft science with hard rules,” professed Stéphane Fouks, vice-president of public relations company Havas, recalling the conversation which, according to him, happened in 1988 between communications adviser Jacques Pilhan and former president François Mitterrand. At the time, Mitterrand confided his desire to speak on television. “Yes, but to say what?” asked his adviser. “The French need to hear me,” he replied. “When you have nothing to say, should you make it known?” Pilhan asked. Mitterrand decided against his TV intervention.

Page has turned between Macron and his majority

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On June 20, Finance Minister Bruno Le Maire, who has so often been mistreated by the Elysée insiders, who have spread rumors against him, accused the president’s advisers of having pushed him into a corner. “The parquet floors of the ministries and the palaces of the Republic are full of woodlice (…) they are in the parquet floors, the grooves of the parquet floor, it’s very difficult to get rid of them,” he said on TV5Monde, targeting the architects of the dissolution, in particular Bruno Roger-Petit, the president’s adviser on historical issues. Le Maire had warned Macron on the evening of June 9 that “a dissolution of convenience would lead to a regime crisis.” His warning went unheeded.

He hates us all

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Philippe Bolo, elected and re-elected in Maine-et-Loire since 2017, almost threw in the towel, despite his chances of victory. “I can’t take it anymore, I’ve lost all faith,” he said. “I’m being asked to get back on the train, but I don’t know who’s driving it,” worried MP Elodie Jacquier-Laforge. After a two-and-a-half-hour meeting, Bayrou sat down on a banquette at the Poule au Pot bistro in Paris with a handful of loyal followers, “groggy,” in the words of one of the guests.

Some psychologists and psychiatrists are witnessing increased stress and anxiety among their patients since the dissolution was announced. But the president’s advisers are explaining that thanks to this electroshock, the country is rediscovering “the essence of democracy.” The Elysée insisted that Macron is following in the footsteps of Charles de Gaulle, who decided to dissolve the Assemblée Nationale after the student revolts of May ’68. “Commentators were already criticizing him for having plunged the country into deep disarray,” but this did not prevent de Gaulle from winning a large majority in the Assemblée, the same advisers pointed out, conveniently forgetting that he resigned a year later.

The Hardest part is the beginning

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His near-disappearance in the weeks that followed was intriguing. Macron did not take part in the legislative elections, which ended in failure. The machine was beginning to jam. The leader of a relative majority, then prime minister Elisabeth Borne, who claimed to be left-wing, was tasked with passing, with the support of the conservatives, bills considered right-wing: the pension reform and the immigration law. She succeeded, but the governing coalition was fractured. Historical political figures are choking on these texts, which break with the progressive ideal of the original Macronist vision.

Macron planned to regain favor by appointing Attal, the youngest prime minister of the Fifth Republic, in January. The Elysée boasted that this was new-found Macron audacity. Borne was abruptly dismissed as the new year began, as were several other ministers, without anyone knowing exactly where the president wanted to go. By text message, an MP warned the president that his troops needed “cuddle therapy.” “I can’t do everything,” Macron snapped.

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Five months later, the European elections were a fiasco, leading to the thunderbolt dissolution of the Assemblée Nationale. Did Macron make a mistake, on June 9, by calling the people to the polls again? Not necessarily, said his former classmate at the ENA school for top civil servants, Gaspard Gantzer. “He’s right. The French want a new gathering for democracy,” said Gantzer, a press relations advisor. “But their problem isn’t the Assemblée Nationale, it’s the president.”

Old Socialist