Grandstand. Emmanuel Macron’s announcement of the project to postpone the legal retirement age to 65 and its justification based on the need to reduce public spending are surprising. It comes at the end of a long succession of crises which, from “yellow vests” to Covid-19, have pointed, on the contrary, to the need for the return of an investor State, but also a “protector”, that is to say to say capable of guaranteeing income from social protection and taking charge of collective needs that have been underestimated for too long (dependency, school, university, health, justice, etc.).
This announcement thus serves as a reminder of the durability, at the heart of the government elites, of a reform agenda which was defined during the 1990s and which has been maintained since then almost independently of changes in the economic and social situation. It must be said that this agenda is intimately linked to the transformations experienced by the politico-administrative elites as the State embarked on its liberal and European transformation.
Over the past three decades, an essential part of the State has in fact found itself busy inventing a new government of the markets and of the euro. Because it was necessary to “govern” all the privatized or liberalized sectors (telecoms, energy, transport, banking, insurance, medicine, etc.), by building, in Brussels as in Paris, a whole chain of so-called “regulatory » responsible for promoting, in the economy but also in the State, a culture of competition and competitiveness defined as closely as possible to market players. And it was also necessary to govern the euro by fitting into the ever denser network of Treasury departments and European central bankers, who have acquired a key role in the “management” of the crises of the last decade, raising the placing the imperatives of “financial stability”, “budgetary consolidation” and “structural reforms” (unemployment, retirement) as the primary horizon of national public policies. This transformation of the State was accompanied by a new public-private partnership forged between the top positions of the State, the world of large companies and the consulting industry (lawyers, consultants, bankers, etc.).
One of the most visible manifestations is the trivialization and intensification of the phenomenon of revolving door (and “retro-retro-retro-routing”) of ministers, European commissioners, regulators and other senior state officials, which is now an integral part of the careers of elites of government. But it has also been paid for by a growing distance between large bodies and public service professionals, faced with growing difficulty in carrying out the missions in which they are engaged.
You have 46.63% of this article left to read. The following is for subscribers only.