From the fight against global warming to gender equality erected as a "great cause of the quinquennium", Emmanuel Macron has shown during his quinquennium his ability to deliver very beautiful speeches.
But these were often followed by actions in total contradiction to his promises.
France 24 comes back to four significant examples yet presented as priorities.
Moralize political life
The election of Emmanuel Macron in 2017 was partly made possible by the cases that interfered with the campaign of the candidate Les Républicains François Fillon.
Candidate with little political experience behind him, Emmanuel Macron can then present himself as a politician without pan and condemn these "practices of the old world".
Pushed by François Bayrou who made it a condition for his support, the former Minister of the Economy of François Hollande then promised a great law of moralization of political life.
Now Minister of Justice, François Bayrou is responsible for drafting it.
This proposes real advances such as the prohibition of family employment for parliamentarians, the limitation of the number of consecutive mandates or even the control of their professional expenses, but, after five years, it is difficult to affirm that probity in politics has been established as an absolute principle.
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Admittedly, François Bayrou, Marielle de Sarnez and Sylvie Goulard were forced to leave the government in June 2017 due to an investigation into the parliamentary assistants of the MoDem in the European Parliament.
Of course, Richard Ferrand also had to leave the government in June 2017 because of his involvement in the Mutuelles de Bretagne affair.
But this principle shattered in the summer of 2018 during the Alexandre Benalla affair.
The latter benefits for many weeks from the support of Emmanuel Macron who then attacks the media and the justice system.
From then on, the Head of State no longer bothered with probity.
Richard Ferrand becomes President of the National Assembly in September 2018 and his indictment, a year later, does not change anything – Justice pronounced a dismissal in March 2021 in the Mutuelles de Bretagne case.
François Bayrou becomes High Commissioner for Planning in September 2020. Gérald Darmanin is appointed Minister of the Interior in July 2020 when he is accused of rape and abuse of weakness by two women – he has since benefited from a no -location.
The Minister of Justice, Éric Dupond-Moretti, was indicted for illegal taking of interests – acts committed in the exercise of his functions – in July 2021. The Minister Delegate for SMEs, Alain Griset,
meanwhile ended up resigning after being sentenced in December 2021 to six months suspended prison sentence and six months suspended ineligibility for a declaration of assets and interests with the HATVP "incomplete or misleading".
The HATVP had sent its file to justice in November 2020. Finally, the secretary general of the Élysée, Alexis Kohler, and the special adviser to Emmanuel Macron, Thierry Solère, are also worried by justice.
Doing politics differently
Understanding early on the weariness and rejection of French politicians and traditional parties, Emmanuel Macron promises during his campaign to "do politics differently".
This is a strong axis of its launch that attracts many volunteers and activists within En Marche, seduced by the prospect of being able to participate in a collaborative way in the development of a political project.
It is then a question of self-management at the local level, of horizontality, of shared decision-making and of dialogue with the opposition.
But like his decisions linked to Covid-19 over the past two years, Emmanuel Macron has had a very vertical practice of power throughout the five-year term.
Parliament and the presidential majority have thus been reduced to being nothing more than a recording chamber for decisions from above.
The newly elected deputies under the banner La République en Marche, in June 2017, had moreover had to commit upon their arrival at the Palais-Bourbon not to oppose the reforms, but also, as in "the world of before", not to support proposals from other parliamentary groups.
Worse, the exercise of power has sometimes been authoritarian, whether through the use of Article 49-3 of the Constitution to push through the pension reform in February 2020 or through violent repression by the forces of the order of the Yellow Vests movement – 82 demonstrators seriously injured, according to the count of independent journalist David Dufresne, including 17 blinded and four having had their hands torn off.
The UN also intervened in March 2019, asking for "a thorough investigation into all reported cases of excessive use of force".
The Council of Europe had called on him a little earlier to "suspend the use of LBD in the context of law enforcement operations", in order to "better respect human rights".
>> To read: Emmanuel Macron, the results (2/4): in the economy, a drip trickle
In addition, Emmanuel Macron has put in a box the reform of the Constitution on which he had committed to abolish the Court of Justice of the Republic (CJR) and adopt a dose of proportionality in the legislative elections.
On the other hand, the Economic, Social and Environmental Council (CESE) has been reformed to become the place dedicated to citizen participation in the political life of the nation.
The idea is to allow the "third chamber of the Republic" to organize other citizens' conventions, on the model of the Citizens' Climate Convention.
But here too, contrary to his commitments, Emmanuel Macron ultimately only took up some of the proposals made by the convention, sometimes even limiting their scope.
Citizens who devoted many working weekends in their free time to this Climate Convention then felt betrayed.
Those who had believed in horizontality in politics also.
Make Our Planet Great Again
On the environment, Emmanuel Macron is starting his five-year term with a bang: after promising during his campaign to invest 15 million euros in ecological transition and having managed to convince the very media-rich Nicolas Hulot to become his Minister for Ecological Transition, he takes advantage of the announcement by Donald Trump of the withdrawal of the United States from the Paris Agreement, in June 2017, to launch an appeal to the whole world to fight against global warming by paraphrasing the American president: "Make Our Planet Great Again".
But the successful communication coup quickly gives way to renunciations.
Emmanuel Macron is backing down on several issues such as the ban on glyphosate, the application of the free trade treaty between Canada and the European Union (Ceta) or the ban on neonicotinoids.
This policy of "small steps" ends up tiring Nicolas Hulot who announced his departure from the government in August 2018 by denouncing the "presence of lobbies in the circles of power".
However, the Head of State can credit the abandonment of several projects fought by environmental activists: this is the case of the Notre-Dame-des-Landes airport near Nantes (January 2018 ), the Montagne d'Or mining project in French Guiana (May 2019) or the Europacity shopping and leisure area in the Paris region (November 2019).
Emmanuel Macron can also boast of having set up the Citizen's Climate Convention in the fall of 2019 following the movement of yellow vests, which had emerged in response to the increase in the carbon tax on fuels.
Tasked with proposing measures to achieve France's greenhouse gas reduction targets while taking social justice into account, the 150 citizens drawn by lot did a remarkable job, resulting in 146 measures in the summer of 2020.
But instead of taking up these proposals, the President of the Republic has, with his Climate and Resilience Law, set aside many measures and distorted many others.
Example: the citizens drawn by lot proposed to prohibit domestic flights that could be replaced by train journeys of less than 4 hours;
>> To read: Emmanuel Macron, the results (3/4): the reduction in social spending thwarted by the crises
The discrepancy between the speeches and the actions of Emmanuel Macron is also verified with the renovation of the "thermal sieves".
While he promised during his campaign the renovation of one million poorly insulated homes during the five-year term and their total elimination in ten years, "more than 4.8 million still exist and the objective will not be achieved", notes the assessment of the president's action produced by the Réseau Action Climat.
Nor will the objectives be met with regard to renewable energies.
With 19.1% of renewables in its energy mix, France was thus, in 2020, the only country in the European Union not to have respected its commitments in this area, set at 23% by Brussels.
The government's lack of will ended up being condemned by French justice which, in February 2021, found the State guilty of "culpable shortcomings" against global warming, before ordering the Prime Minister and the competent ministers "to take all necessary measures to repair the ecological damage" before December 31, 2022.
Gender equality
Erected as "great cause of the five-year term", the fight for equality between women and men has in fact never been a priority for the government, which has moreover been confined until 2020 to a State Secretariat attached to the Prime Minister.
In a five-year term marked by the #MeToo planetary movement, progress nevertheless exists.
Emmanuel Macron kept his promise on the opening of medically assisted procreation (PMA) for single women and couples of homosexual women, extended by two weeks - from 12 to 14 weeks - the deadlines for the voluntary interruption of pregnancy (abortion) and extended free contraceptive pills to young girls under 15 in 2020 and to young women aged 18 to 25 in 2022.
The Grenelle of domestic violence, organized in the fall of 2019, resulted in the strengthening of the protection order which allows the judge to ensure in the emergency - without waiting for the filing of a complaint - the protection of victims of domestic violence, the installation of the anti-reconciliation bracelet to keep violent men away from their victim or even the 24/7 service of 3919, a telephone number for women victims of violence.
>> To read: Fight against violence against women: France still "far from the mark"
However, the fight against violence against women has never benefited from the necessary means.
While feminist associations have been calling for a billion euros for a long time to fight against feminicides and violence in general – a budget which would allow the construction of 20,000 places of specialized accommodation in particular – the government devotes only a third to it. of the sum requested, according to a report published in March 2022 by Oxfam.
The budget devoted to Gender Equality for 2022 is only 50 million euros out of an overall government budget of 883 billion euros, i.e. in all and for all 0.25% of the budget. of State.
In addition, the most glaring inequality remains very present: despite the implementation of an equality index in 2018 to fight against wage inequalities, men are still paid on average 30% more than women, according to INSEE.
"Precariousness, wage inequalities at all levels and the revaluation of predominantly female professions, including qualified ones such as nurses, midwives and teachers, have been left aside", judges economist Rachel Silvera, quoted by the magazine Alternatives Economiques.
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