The head of state gave himself Monday "100 days" to act "in the service of the France". Determined to reconnect with the French despite a record unpopularity, he will travel Wednesday to the Bas-Rhin and Thursday to the Hérault.

At a rapid pace, he gave the social partners their roadmap: a negotiation of the "pact of life at work", the contours of which are still unclear, by "the end of this year" and another on vocational schools "by the summer".

"Social dialogue takes time," Medef president Geoffroy Roux de Bézieux said on Monday. Leaving the Elysee, he recalled waiting "obviously for the unions to return" to discuss in particular the employment of seniors, while the president of the confederation of SMEs François Asselin evoked their return the week following May 8.

"He asks us to do what we already do rather well between us: the problem is social dialogue with the executive," commented for his part on BFMTV the secretary general of the CFTC Cyril Chabanier.

"Next to the plate"

But with the help of the tenors of the government, it is for the executive to immediately begin the offensive to end the crisis.

Interior Minister Gérald Darmanin called for "a strong bill" on immigration, postponed because of social protest and in the absence of guarantee of the LR vote. "I'm sure that with Les Républicains we can agree on this issue," he said.

LR votes had however been missing for the bill raising the legal retirement age to 64 years. The executive had to engage the responsibility of the government, saved by nine votes.

The Minister Delegate for Public Accounts, Gabriel Attal arrives at the Elysee, on March 27, 2023 in Paris © Ludovic MARIN / AFP / Archives

For his part, Budget Minister Gabriel Attal pledged to "continue to build a Marshall Plan for the middle classes", with measures on wages and public services.

Even on the debt, Finance Minister Bruno Le Maire announced that he intended to "accelerate the pace of deleveraging" of the France to avoid "throwing money out the window" in a period of sharp rise in interest rates.

On Monday evening, the President of the Republic had also mentioned as projects health, education or the fight against delinquency and fraud.

Prime Minister Elisabeth Borne will present her roadmap next week in the council of ministers, according to her entourage.

President Emmanuel Macron during a televised address at the Elysee Palace on April 17, 2023 in Paris © Ludovic MARIN / AFP

A way to occupy the field to finally pass after a second five-year term hampered by the political and social crisis of pensions?

"Restricting the concerns of the French to the sole issue of pensions would be missing the point," said government spokesman Olivier Véran, summing up the state of mind of an executive who dreams of closing this parenthesis.

"Noise without consistency"

Because the protest remains strong despite the validation of the law by the Constitutional Council on Friday.

According to the Ministry of the Interior, 24,000 people demonstrated Monday night in France during President Macron's speech, banging on pots and pans.

Protest against the pension reform during President Emmanuel Macron's speech on April 17, 2023 in Paris © Geoffroy Van der Hasselt / AFP

"Symbolically, with these +casserolades+, the demonstrators want to cover by their festive din a presidential word that is perceived by them as a form of noise without consistency and without content," Pierre Lefébure, a political scientist at the University of Paris Nord, told AFP.

Nearly 15.1 million viewers according to Mediamétrie watched the president, a follower of this type of speech, without questions or contradictions.

"In the projects he lists us I see either very concrete things that divide deeply," such as the reform of vocational schools or the RSA, or points "totally obscure and very general" as on wages, criticized his counterpart at the CGT Sophie Binet.

© 2023 AFP