Paris (AFP)

Operation appeasement for Emmanuel Macron: he receives Tuesday evening the deputies of his majority who hope to be listened to and not admonished after tensions with elected officials, against a backdrop of sometimes violent hostility against the pension reform.

Scheduled at 8 pm, this meeting will be a "direct exchange" between the president and the deputies LREM, MoDem and Agir, with, for the time being, the announced presence of a single minister, Marc Fesneau, in charge of Relations with Parliament.

This meeting was, according to the Elysée Palace, scheduled well before the "crisis" around the bill on leave for bereavement for children, which crystallized a resentment of unprecedented magnitude since the start of the quinquennium.

At the Elysée Palace, the need for the watchword "unity and cohesion" is affirmed after this "little moment of punctual and limited tension".

Because Emmanuel Macron's call to show "humanity" was perceived as an unfair reproach by LREM elected officials who only applied the government order to reject the amendment extending this leave from five to 12 days.

This episode created "a precedent in relations between the majority and the executive", says an elected official. "The idiots", "shut up", "it was a bit much". "This will leave fairly lasting traces in the group," she continues.

A member of the government recognizes that the deputies "felt that their honor was tarnished". "They thought they were doing well and therefore reacted very badly to the president's message," he explains. He underlines that these reproaches against the head of state are "a first in two and a half years of mandate".

According to him, "Tuesday's meeting must be an important moment of reordering" between elected officials who often feel neglected and a president they find too inaccessible.

- "Abscess" -

It is only the third time since the start of the five-year term that the Head of State has invited them to the Elysée Palace.

"Exchanges with the president, we do not have many. They are useful and rare," said LREM MP Laurent Saint-Martin on Monday on LCP.

"There is a need to bring together the points of view, to discuss, to perhaps pierce the abscesses which have been created because of blunders on each side," said Minister of Territorial Cohesion Jacqueline Gourault.

The elected Walkers seek all the more the support of their leader that the municipal ones are announced difficult and that they undergo, in first line, often fierce opposition by defending its policy.

The context is "not easy" for the majority: "we are in the hard, in the middle of the five-year period, with a pension reform break-in-mouth." Added to this is "a context of violence against deputies," says a walker.

Targets of an anti-Macron feeling since the "yellow vests", which is exacerbated by the pension reform, several of them have suffered insults, degradations of their tenure or even assaults. Like the deputy LREM of Seine-et-Marne Michèle Peyron, who said at the end of January in the hemicycle having suffered a verbal attack during a greeting ceremony.

- "Hug therapy" -

But if the invitation to the Elysée Palace will have a part of "cuddling", as recognized by Jacqueline Gourault, it can also be accompanied by a reminder to discipline. The head of state likes neither dissension, nor reproaches, nor the complaints of these new elected officials who owe him everything, believes an observer.

At a similar meeting in September, Emmanuel Macron had outraged them and blamed them for not going enough on the ground. And basically, he asked them to look at the subject of immigration "in the face". A hardened tone that had made Walkers from the left uncomfortable.

Elected officials are a little afraid of being lectured again. "The speech may not be well received. In September it had been two minutes of cuddling and three quarters of an hour to cover us up," according to a parliamentarian.

An LREM manager confirms: "Emmanuel Macron will undoubtedly have a message on the group's departures - of which several elected officials have recently left the door - and a discipline component: + do not forget where you come from, how you became deputies and where the division leads +. Tuesday evening it will put things back in working order. "

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