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Emmanuel
Macron to resign from French government: source
Economy
minister is preparing a presidential bid.
By
Pierre Briançon and
Nicholas Vinocur
8/30/16, 1:57 PM CET
PARIS — Emmanuel
Macron was preparing on Tuesday to offer his resignation to French
President François Hollande, according to a source close to France’s
economy minister who confirmed an earlier report in business daily
Les Echos.
The resignation,
which has been rumored for months, will allow Macron to focus on a
possible presidential bid after he launched his own political
movement, En Marche (“Forward”) in April.
Macron had
considered leaving the government then, on the advice of several of
his associates, but finally delayed in order to get a clearer idea of
how the presidential field would look in the fall, an aide explained
at the time.
Le Monde daily,
citing a source close to the minister, reported that Macron would
offer Hollande his resignation in the afternoon at a meeting not
written into the president’s official schedule.
Macron’s
spokeswoman and other members of his staff were not immediately
available to comment.
No longer serving as
a minister would free Macron to devote himself more fully to his En
Marche campaign, which lost some momentum over the summer after a
terrorist attack in Nice refocused national attention on security,
not an obvious strong point for an economy-focused minister.
A former investment
banker with Rothschilds, Macron, 38, joined Hollande’s team as an
adviser, where he was credited with engineering the Socialist
president’s abrupt shift to supply-side economic policies in 2014.
As economy minister,
Macron focused on defending French interests in trade disputes and
promoting startup culture. But exposure also brought criticism from
Socialist colleagues in government, including Prime Minister Manuel
Valls, who complained in private and at times in public that Macron —
who describes himself as being sympathetic to the Left although not a
member of the Socialist Party — was too self-promoting and stepped
outside the limits of his cabinet post.
Authors:
Pierre Briançon
and
Nicholas Vinocur
|
France’s
summer stars face a tough fall
As
presidential campaign season gets serious, media darlings Alain Juppé
and Emmanuel Macron will come under fire.
By PIERRE BRIANÇON
8/29/16, 5:30 AM CET
PARIS — The spring
and summer darlings of the French political scene may struggle in the
fall.
Alain Juppé and
Emmanuel Macron became France’s two most popular politicians over
the last few months as voters, tired of both sitting President
François Hollande and his predecessor Nicolas Sarkozy, are looking
for new leaders whom they consider more able to deal with the tough
period France is going through.
True, the French
seem to like both men for different reasons — Juppé because he has
experience, Macron because he doesn’t. The former is 71 and was
prime minister under conservative president Jacques Chirac more than
20 years ago. The latter is 38 and has only been economy minister —
a relatively minor job in the French government — for the last two
years.
But so far both men
remain high in the electorate’s esteem. Juppé is still the most
popular politician, according to the latest IPSOS poll, after
spending most of the year in town meetings and honing his message,
promising a shock-and-awe push for reform in his mandate’s first
six months. And Macron seems to have benefited from his increasing
political assertiveness, launching a political movement and promising
his followers that he would “lead [them] to victory” next year.
It’s worth noting
that part of their appeal is relative, and that they only stand out
in contrast to the deep mistrust in which the French hold most other
politicians.
Macron’s main
problem is that he is mostly popular with conservative voters, and
not that much within his own camp.
But both men will
face similar challenges to translate into actual votes what IPSOS
pollster Mathieu Gallard calls their “paper popularity.” Juppé
is running in the conservative Les Républicains party’s primary,
to be held in November. Macron is mulling leaving the Socialist
government in September or October to be free to run as an
independent candidate in the presidential election in May 2017 — a
decision he hasn’t made yet, according to an aide.
Juppé’s main
rival for now is Sarkozy, who didn’t surprise anyone last week when
he officially confirmed he would run. Macron’s main problem is that
he is mostly popular with conservative voters, and not that much
within his own camp.
Bubble deflation
Several factors may
soon challenge both men’s standing in the polls, advisers from
within their own camps acknowledge. The first is that the Nice terror
attacks in July have put an increased emphasis on security concerns.
On the Right, that plays into the tough law-and-order campaign
Sarkozy is preparing. On the Left it favors the experience of a
sitting president to deal with threats both domestic and foreign.
The second reason
why “the bubble may be deflating,” in the words of a top Juppé
adviser, is that as France gets nearer to the primaries and the
general election, both Juppé and Macron will increasingly become
targets for political attacks — first from within their own camps,
then from their traditional adversaries.
It has already
begun. Sarkozy has spent months alluding not-so-subtly to Juppé’s
age, even though he’s only 10 years younger than his rival. And
Macron’s proclamations that the Socialist government he belongs to
has failed has turned Prime Minister Manuel Valls, his former ally,
into an arch-enemy.
“It’s high time
for all of this to stop,” a visibly irate Valls said on the eve of
Macron’s first big public rally in July.
Valls, meanwhile, is
entertaining presidential ambitions of his own in case Hollande bows
out, and the prime minister would then be likely to run on a
law-and-order platform remarkably similar to that of Sarkozy.
So far the attacks
against Juppé and Macron are only skirmishes compared to what awaits
the duo once the campaigns start in earnest. Then the candidates’
specific ideas or proposals, which the French tend to forget when
polled for popularity ratings, will come under attack.
In that respect
Macron may have the most to lose if people start to really pay
attention to what he is saying. “There’s a paradox that he
remains highly popular with his resolutely liberal agenda — both on
the economy and on social matters — in a country that is not that
liberal at all,” Gallard said.
As economy minister,
Macron has defended reforms that were always far more popular on the
Right than on the Left — such as scrapping the 35-hour week, or
liberalizing labor markets.
And ever since the
November 2015 terror attacks in Paris, he has advocated a response
“that would not be all about security” but would include dealing
with the derelict banlieues, home to a high proportion of French
Muslims. There is “too much urgency and emotion” in the current
debates, he recently said.
Simple solutions
All this might make
Macron look like a man running against the times, one of his own
advisers admits. “Trying to be open and reasonable when politicians
are competing on closed borders and demagogy is a fine line to
tread,” the adviser said.
But speaking at the
first rally of his official campaign on Saturday, Juppé didn’t
seem to consider that a losing battle. Without naming Sarkozy, he
seemed on the contrary intent on emphasizing the difference with his
rival. “My campaign will not be based on fear,” he insisted.
The “three
challenges” France must take on, Juppé said, were equality between
men and women, the ecology and technological change.
“I will not accept
a French-style Guantanamo in which thousands of people would be
detained without trial on mere suspicion” — Alain Juppé
In the current
context, that might be enough to make Juppé look like candidate
Moonbeam.
The former PM
however knows he has to talk about terrorism, which seems the only
theme Sarkozy intends to run on. But he thinks French voters also
want to hear what candidates have to say about the economy, education
and even — he and Macron being the only two politicians to even
mention the theme — Europe.
His problem is to
find a way to appear firm and resolute without emulating Sarkozy’s
fierce law-and-order rhetoric — which his aide called “Le
Pen-light.” In the book the former president published last week
announcing his candidacy, Sarkozy casually brushed off the concerns
of “finicky lawyers” concerning proposals that would raise
serious constitutional questions — for example on the detention of
people suspected of terrorist sympathies.
“I will not accept
a French-style Guantanamo in which thousands of people would be
detained without trial on mere suspicion,” Juppé said Saturday in
a direct answer to Sarkozy’s proposal.
“He’s not the
kind to go for the simple solutions people sometimes demand in times
like these,” his aide noted.
But the unspoken
fear among candidates eager to appear reasonable and measured is that
new terror attacks in the next few months might push French voters
further towards simplicity.
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