“It is perhaps in a Mitterrandian turning point that the salvation of Macron’s second five-year term lies”

En this return to school, everyone notices the trouble that affects Emmanuel Macron. But where does it come from? For some, the president locks himself in the posture of crisis and tragedy, for lack of being able to reform. For others, it now favors compromise, and in doing so also renounces transformation. In any case, Macron 2 seems to betray Macron 1, who had given hope to the country around the mysterious mantra of ” at the same time “. And if the presidential disarray had in fact an old point of birth, but which would not appear clearly until this start of the 2022 school year?

Hypothesis: the current disorder can be understood as the exhaustion of the relationship to political time promoted in 2017 by the president. At the time, we wanted to see in the “at the same time” a device for overcoming the right/left divide. However, this posture is revealed retrospectively to initiate a much deeper shift: the “at the same time” was the sign of a new relationship to time. An ambitious, original – and risky relationship with time.

Time is the raw material of politics. It is the clay of the statesman or woman. But let us note the rupture: for François Mitterrand, heir to the classical tradition, ” Time takes time “. For Emmanuel Macron, “everything has to be done at the same time”. There clearly appears the upheaval in the relationship to time conveyed by Macronism.

The tactical and the strategic

To leave time to time is to realize that the time of urgency, of reaction, of crisis is not made of the same wood as the time of reform, of transformation, of preparation. Richelieu (to whom Mitterrand’s phrase is sometimes attributed) established that it was first necessary to plant oaks in order to dispose of the vessels a century later, and then to cut young beeches to make arrows of all wood. Leaving time to time is anything but doing nothing: it is doing what should be done, separately, in each of the two orders of time.

Macronism, in its seduction, compresses, telescopes and merges the two instances of time. The “at the same time” cuts the logical distinction between the tactical and the strategic, between the urgent and the necessary: ​​believing that it inhabits all the strata of time, it slips over each of them, and does not mobilize any of them. This exhaustion of the “at the same time”, as a regime of political action, had largely begun during the first five-year term. The “whatever the cost”, an exceptional device if ever there was one, which over time has become a budgetary doctrine, is the strongest sign of this.

You have 50.51% of this article left to read. The following is for subscribers only.