Paris (AFP)
May 7, 2017: in the courtyard of the Louvre, in front of thousands of enthusiastic supporters, Emmanuel Macron celebrates his election but warns: "It will not be easy every day, I know it. The task will be hard".
May 7, 2020: the day does not promise to be "easy" Thursday for the Head of State who, with the government, will have to decide: is France ready to be unconfined on May 11, first step of the exit of the coronavirus crisis?
Three years ago, no one would have imagined that a virus would almost shut down the country like the rest of the world, and would completely upset the quinquennium, with the approach of the presidential election of 2022.
By decreeing the general confinement of the population on March 16, the head of state immediately draws a radical consequence: "I decided that all the reforms in progress would be suspended, starting with the pension reform".
So here he freezes himself all his projects, including the "mother of all reforms", which earned him the longest social conflict in France for thirty years.
In the process, his government also gave up tightening the criteria for unemployment insurance.
In fact, the crisis is exploding the economic foundations of its program. It will undoubtedly erase the slow decline in unemployment and the objectives of reducing deficits and public debt. More than 100 billion euros will go to support companies, subsidize short-time working, save big companies, help the poorest. A massive plan is also promised for the hospital.
Emmanuel Macron does not just have the ambition to restore the French economy. True to his desire for reform, he sees the post-Covid era as a blank page where everything seems possible.
"Let us know how to think outside the box, of ideologies and let us know how to reinvent ourselves, me first," he launched on April 13.
"It is obvious that we will not be able to resume the quinquennium where we left it", abounds Stanislas Guérini, the boss of LREM.
To reflect on the "next world", the Head of State calls on his entire network.
He has already identified several key themes: the sovereignty of the nation - and not only through that of Europe -, solidarity, the protective state and ecology, explains a close.
Sovereignty, with its corollary of "producing French", promises to be a decisive concept. From March 12, Emmanuel Macron surprised by advocating a "break" with a certain form of globalization, by "placing certain goods and services outside the laws of the market".
France's dependence on China for masks and other pharmaceutical products convinced him of the need to regain industrial sovereignty in certain sectors, on a national or European scale.
A term which he now assumes. "Sovereignty, I was already talking about it but it didn't correspond to my image," he slipped to editorialists on April 13.
- What figures? -
He will have to act quickly to achieve such a turn which is not entirely a flip-flop. The "made in France" was already at the beginning of 2020 a new leitmotif at the Elysée.
"Emmanuel Macron believes that the French want to feel that they are once again in control of their destiny and to produce French for their basic needs. And that only the protective State can restore this feeling to them. It is a very Gaullian approach", indicates his entourage .
As for ecology, the conditioning of massive aid to the Air France company for the abandonment of short flights perhaps draws a more marked commitment.
It remains to define the faces that can help it to make credible a new impetus. Besides replacing ministers, will he go so far as to change Prime Minister?
He must first overcome the persistent distrust of the French towards his personality and his politics. Its popularity rose with the crisis, but much less than that of Angela Merkel in Germany, Giuseppe Conte in Italy or Boris Johnson in the United Kingdom.
"There could have been a before and after + crisis of the Covid-19 +. This will probably not be the case, unless he manages to impose himself as the president who will know how to raise France", analyzes the last BVA-Orange-RTL Observatory.
© 2020 AFP