Communication in crisis at the top of the state

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By: Amaury de Rochegonde Follow

While Emmanuel Macron will speak this Monday, April 13 at 8 p.m., the executive's crisis communication during this period of coronavirus epidemic leaves many observers cautious.

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It will be the fourth time Monday that the president will address the French since March 12, the day he announced the closure of schools, before the first round of municipal elections. Since then, Emmanuel Macron spoke on March 16 to announce the establishment of containment with his famous anaphor " we are at war " and he tried to respond in detail to the mounting concerns over the delivery of sanitary equipment, the March 25, from a military hospital in Mulhouse.

But a month after his first intervention, Emmanuel Macron has to face a growing distrust linked to a communication deemed deficient even in his own camp. An Odoxa-Dentsu Consulting poll, published on Thursday, testifies to this: 76% of French people think that the government has " lied " to them about the masks by claiming them ineffective for the population. Among La République en Marche sympathizers, six out of ten still believe that power on this subject has been neither " constant ", nor " clear ", nor " consistent ".

" The use of the mask in the general population is not recommended and is not useful " said Olivier Véran, the Minister of Health at the end of March. It was then a question of having “social distancing” and of reserving the existing masks for the nursing staff. Only, what we know today is that the government must and must always face a shortage not only on FFP2 masks, which did not exist at the start of the epidemic, but also on surgical masks. The wearing of a mask by the population is now for the Minister an " open question ". Seven out of ten French people are in favor of it, but the WHO does not consider their widespread use justified unless the barrier measures are difficult or impossible to implement.

The government wants to be humble today in the face of the pandemic, with as much as possible precise answers provided by scientists and transmitted by the Director General of Health Jérôme Salomon. As for Emmanuel Macron, he visited, Thursday, Professor Didier Raoult, in Marseille, to spread the message that he was not ruling out the chloroquine track.

However, he could not avoid a trial of public opinion: that of having poorly prepared for this crisis, with a hospital system left without sufficient resources, a health policy dictated by the state of stocks. And a feeling of lack of control at the top of the state. Now everyone is reduced to making their own mask by following a tutorial. And on this subject again, the government seems to be lagging behind reality.

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