Emmanuel Macron unveils this Thursday afternoon his program for the presidential election, during a press conference, the first as a candidate. This morning, the political columnist Nicolas Beytout looks back on this upcoming speech and on the direction that the campaign of the current head of state is taking.
“24 days before the election, this is indeed a turning point. A turning point in the campaign since he, defending champion, puts on the table a set of proposals which will therefore not fail to give rise ( finally) the debate. And then it is a turning point in his campaign since the candidate-president had rather organized until then an absence of contact with the journalists, which went hand in hand with an absence of debates with his political adversaries. which had ended up becoming untenable, under the battering of the left and right oppositions who accused him of fleeing controversy, of not assuming his record, in short of not playing the game of democracy. And this little music began to take in public opinion.
Correct small malfunctions
Is this what Emmanuel Macron wants to correct by submitting to questions from journalists? That, and also other small malfunctions which, by force, ended up giving a mixed feeling about his start to the campaign. To summarize: in a fortnight, a letter to all French people whose content was more or less banal, a Netflix-style imitation series, supposed to be modern, but whose second episode is already boring, a first public meeting at cord to Poissy from which there emerged a feeling of being among oneself, a call to order from the National Commission for the Control of the Presidential Election (CNCCEP) which asked Emmanuel Macron to stop using the Twitter account of the Presidency of the Republic to broadcast “messages relating to the electoral propaganda” of the candidate. And then, a program on TF1, whose format had been largely thought out according to the requirements of the Élysée, but from which it did not emerge as a winner.
And when the favorite does not win, the feeling of failure becomes more palpable. And we say to ourselves that, with the means that are those of La République en Marche, with the time that the teams had to prepare for what everyone knew had to happen, the result is for the moment quite average. So be careful, none of this is decisive, and the candidate Macron remains very firmly at the top of all the polls. But we have seen since Wednesday that after a sharp rise at the start of the war, the curves are settling or gently reversing in several opinion polls.
Isn’t the stunning effect of the war beginning to dissipate a little?
It must play, indeed. It’s a flashing light that adds to all the little signals that tell the outgoing President: you can’t rely on your warlord character alone; you cannot give the image of someone who refuses the confrontation of ideas or the questioning of the media. Hence the exchange with journalists that will immediately follow the unveiling of its program: immediately published, immediately questioned.
And meanwhile, the government is rolling out its resilience plan to mitigate the effects of war on the economy. In a perfect role-playing game between the Élysée and Matignon which aligns the promises to increase the salaries of civil servants, the billions of euros in aid, the blocking of energy prices, the partial unemployment scheme, support for most vulnerable professions. All of this is very well done: in the government the day-to-day management of the crisis and the announcement of aid measures which can only be favorable to the rating of the tenant of the Élysée. And the candidate reaps.
It is for this reason that it was necessary to quickly correct this impression of confinement of the candidate in his character of President, and to bring him back down to normal life, the one he can no longer know since his accession to the Élysée, that of a candidate among eleven others, equal in rights and duties. As much as possible.”