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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