segunda-feira, 21 de agosto de 2017

Macron’s 100 days: Coming down to earth with a bump


Macron’s 100 days: Coming down to earth with a bump
French president made early international impact but quickly lost popularity at home.

By           PIERRE BRIANÇON          8/21/17, 4:01 AM CET

Some are beginning to wonder whether the young president, who promised to change the nation, will be able to change his own style of governing | Alain Jocard/AFP via Getty Images

PARIS — When he was running for French president, Emmanuel Macron always proclaimed that he would govern “over the long term,” ignore the short-term “noise” of real-time news and commentary, and not pay much attention to volatile popularity polls.

Macron and his aides also insisted that he wouldn’t want to be judged on his first 100 days.

It turns out that, at least, was a good idea.

Macron reaches that early landmark on Monday having made a splash on the world stage but having also racked up a series of missteps and blunders at home. And the parliament dominated by inexperienced MPs from the party he created just last year has been criticized for an amateurish approach to legislating.

As a result, and after a series of summer faux pas, the polls that the president professes not to consult now show he has a lower approval rating than even his unpopular predecessor François Hollande at the same stage in his presidency. Not since Jacques Chirac in 2002 has a new president sunk so fast in such surveys.

Macron’s defenders point out that he is still on a learning curve — and that he has shown he can be a fast learner. “You aren’t born president, you grow into the job. Look at the mistakes Barack Obama and Angela Merkel made when they started out,” said former MEP and Green party leader Daniel Cohn-Bendit in a recent interview.

Macron has so far failed to convince the French that the qualities that got him elected against all odds are helping him to govern effectively | Aurelien Meunier/Getty Images
The pessimists, on the other hand, fear that Macron’s own style of governing is at fault. They wonder whether the young president, who promised to change the nation, will be able to change himself. And they are warning of more trouble ahead once the government starts implementing the reforms the president pledged during his campaign — a process that hasn’t really begun in earnest yet.

Strategy session

Feeling that his first steps as president left something to be desired, Macron convened a special strategy meeting of his closest political allies at the Elysée palace at the end of July.

Some aides, a few Cabinet members who were early supporters of Macron’s presidential bid, a couple of parliamentary bigwigs and officials of the president’s La République en Marche (LREM) party were invited to the powwow. Macron wanted to correct his course after what looked like two months of chaotic on-the-job training.

The government had been taken by surprise by hostile reaction to what it thought were modest cuts in housing benefits. The armed forces’ chief of staff — France’s top military officer — had resigned over cuts to the defense budget. Macron himself had seemed at odds with his own prime minister, Edouard Philippe, and called off some of the measures announced by the PM in his maiden speech to parliament in early July. Meanwhile, Labor Minister Muriel Pénicaud, tasked with steering through Macron’s signature labor market reform in the fall, was caught up in an ethics probe.

But even the organization of that meeting looked like a blunder. As it started, Macron complained that Philippe — the former conservative MP who had been the new president’s surprise choice to head the Cabinet — hadn’t been invited, and ordered that he should be present at such gatherings in future.

“Yes, we are beginners, and we’ve made beginners’ mistakes, but look at the laws we passed” — Gilles Le Gendre, vice president of LREM in parliament
As often happens with governments going through a bad patch, participants mostly blamed their woes on “poor communication,” according to a meeting participant.

Others concur with that analysis. “We didn’t realize that with so little opposition to speak of in parliament, the focus would be on us,” Gilles Le Gendre, a Paris MP and the vice president of the LREM group in parliament, told POLITICO.

“Yes, we are beginners, and we’ve made beginners’ mistakes, but look at the laws we passed,” he added.

During their opening, extraordinary summer session, MPs notably voted through laws intended to clean up the political system and giving the government wide powers to reform the labor market.

As for the Cabinet, Le Gendre added, “yes, there were small blunders, but it comes with the territory” of a radical change of the guard in French politics after the spring’s presidential and parliamentary elections.

But some in the government say there are more serious problems at work.

Both in substance and in style, in domestic as well as foreign policy, the 39-year-old Macron has so far failed to convince the French that the qualities that got him elected against all odds on May 7 are helping him to govern effectively.

Second-guessing

Macron is said to have been irritated by the government’s blunders, but some point out that his own presidential style is at fault. And that it doesn’t help when the president second-guesses his ministers and admonishes them for decisions that prove unpopular — even though he had sanctioned them in the first place.

Both the housing benefit snafu and the quarrel over the military budget stemmed from the government’s choice to do everything to bring France’s budget deficit under the EU limit of 3 percent of GDP, after an audit revealed that the previous Socialist government had been rather over-optimistic on the state of public finances.

 “[Macron] could have gone to Brussels and pleaded that it was not his deficit but Hollande’s. Instead, he made the bad strategic choice. Once you make a bad strategic choice, you can’t have good policy decisions,” railed a finance ministry official who has served under both socialist and conservative governments.

Some, however, say the government’s decision was more about sending a signal than pure economic policy. “It was important for France’s international credibility to show it is keen on reducing deficits, and doing that through spending cuts,” said Isabelle Mateos y Lago, chief investment strategist at Blackrock, a big U.S. investment fund.

“Just as he starts talking, he will also have to start acting … That will take more than carefully staged virile handshakes” — A government official
And the eurozone recovery meant the cuts “won’t hurt the economy much,” Mateos y Lago added.

Le Gendre, the MP, argued the cuts were “indiscriminate and a bit brutal” because you can’t be subtle so late in the financial year.

Making a priority of cutting the deficit led Philippe to announce on July 4 that the government would have to postpone promised tax reforms, such as deep cuts in wealth tax or the gradual repeal of a broad real estate tax. Faced with public uproar, Macron promptly put both reforms back on this year’s agenda — even though the French lower house had approved Philippe’s program in a vote six days earlier.

That illustrated to some the limits of Macron’s chosen governing style — the so-called “Jupiter” approach, named after the supreme god of Roman mythology, with a distant president focused on foreign affairs and long-term big issues, not the intricacies of policy.

“If you pretend to let the Cabinet make policy and don’t take care of things upstream, you end up second-guessing your prime minister and your ministers, which chips away at their credibility,” acknowledged a government aide who requested anonymity because he is not authorized to talk to the media.

Foreign forays

In the international arena, by contrast, Macron’s first steps left French diplomats elated at the new president’s capacity to restore the country’s diplomatic prestige.

Within Europe, Macron’s pledges to implement serious economic reforms made it possible for France to talk with Germany with some credibility. Beyond Europe, it just took a virile handshake with U.S. President Donald Trump and a testy lunch with Vladimir Putin to show that France was back in the game.

Or so it seemed. “After all, 40 percent of diplomacy is theater, and we have a president who understands that perfectly well,” said an admiring French diplomat who served as an ambassador in more than one European capital.

“Of course,” he added, “for now we’re still waiting for the other 60 percent.”

Even though they took pride in the president’s style, French diplomats noted that he still has things to learn on substance.

Macron’s eagerness to emphasize his differences with his predecessors has led him to make odd pronouncements. He said in June that he wanted to “break with 10 years of imported neo-conservatism” in French foreign policy but, in reality, his stance is broadly in keeping with France’s long-term approach to both Europe and the wider world.

Contrary to his Jupiterian pledge, Macron has now decided he needs to be more involved in day-to-day decisions.

After humiliating his prime minister, taking his ministers to task for their blunders, and calling for better policies, he has now embarked on a tighter centralization of decisions at the Elysée palace.

His presidency so far has been one of images more than words, and words more than deeds. Pictures and video clips of the president outnumber his speeches, his press interviews have been almost non-existent, and his main actions so far have often been to contradict his own Cabinet.

He will start to become more visibly involved in the business of governing in September by “speaking” to the nation, said an aide — whether through a speech, a media interview or a press conference is unclear. That’s something he hasn’t done seriously ever since he was elected, save for a few careful soundbites during photo opportunities.


“Just as he starts talking, he will also have to start acting,” a government official noted. “That will take more than carefully staged virile handshakes.”

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