WalfQuotidien

Macron towards a historic second term

With Macron, history will not stutter.

If his predecessors, Hollande and Sarkozy, did not succeed in renewing their mandate, he is well on his way to having a second one.

A first, since the establishment of the five-year term.

disturbing breakthrough of the far right, with two candidates in the first five places in the first round

Marine Le Pen and Eric Zemmour together total 30% of the votes cast this Sunday, April 10, more than the score of outgoing President Emmanuel Macron

Emmanuel Macron wants to replay the episode of 2017.

The outgoing president wants to be a unifier.

Paradoxical,

for the one who calls himself Jupiter refusing to descend into the arena during his mandate and the electoral campaign.

Today he is being overtaken by the realities of little people on the edge.

Angry.

And extremely disappointed.

Emmanuel Macron will therefore have to bring together a fractured electorate to hope to be re-elected.

Africa will not have been particularly present in the French electoral campaign.

Which, in itself, is not really new, except that, this year, the absence has been accentuated with the war in Ukraine and its socio-economic repercussions on the Old Continent, thereby upsetting more than ever turned towards domestic concerns: gas, gasoline and electricity prices, pensions, in short, purchasing power.

Africa is so far away,

and the theme of Franco-African relations

have often been apprehended under the reductive prism of immigration, of which extremists of all stripes, from Marine to Nicolas Dupont-Aignan via Eric Zemmour, have had their fill, waving as usual the scarecrow of migrants, accused of all the sins of France, the better to sell their political junk

five years ago, we thought that the arrival at the Élysée of the almost forty-something, born after the decolonization, would bring an essential rejuvenation to a Franco-African relationship that badly needed it.

Alas

the beautiful promises of the five-year term, carried in particular by the exchanges without taboos or filters that the freshly-emerged president had had with the students of the University of Ouagadougou in November 2017, have flown away.

The disenchantment is so deep that it is necessary to change the paradigm, whether on questions

of defence, migration or the CFA Franc.

if the black continent was hardly enthusiastic about this French presidential election, it is quite simply one of the tangible signs of the end of the honeymoon between Africans and France.

France, which drags the original sin of the former colonizer and to which sticks the CFA Franc, an increasingly contested currency and battle horse of the Pan-Africanists.

France's African policy will not change fundamentally, and that, regardless of the candidate who emerges victorious from this presidential election.

Macron or Le Pen, it will be white cap or white cap as far as the interests of France are concerned.

At most, it is the envelope that will change.

for Africa and insecurity in the Sahel, the CFA franc and its future, the fight against poverty, we will have to go back or rather wait for the new tenant or to bring it back to the Élysée is paying a diplomatic display visit to our tropics to replay the broken record of promises of a break with French paternalism.