Covid-19, Emmanuel Macron's best ally for the 2022 presidential campaign? Covid-19, Emmanuel Macron's best ally for the 2022 presidential campaign?

Monday, July 12, 7 p.m. He worked on his speech all weekend. But, strangely enough, an hour before the speech, there is still no control truck at the Élysée. And for good reason! Emmanuel Macron will not speak at the palace that day. His procession leaves rue du Faubourg-Saint-Honoré to record outside the walls, in a magnificent setting: the ephemeral Grand-Palais. Arnaud Jolens took care of the scene, thanks to a second camera, the president appears to be standing right in front of the iron lady, who is actually eight hundred meters away. At eight o'clock, he speaks and regains control.

From the start, he announces one of the most drastic measures in the world to push for vaccination: the health pass will become compulsory in almost all public places, for culture and leisure, from July 21, then at the beginning of August in trains, bars and restaurants, not to mention shopping malls. A vaccination obligation will be imposed on September 15 on caregivers in hospitals, clinics, nursing homes and retirement homes. Finally, the tests, so far free, will be paid for at the start of the school year. Living without being vaccinated becomes difficult. Emmanuel Macron assumes this pressure: “Everywhere, we will have the same approach, recognize good citizenship and apply the restrictions to the non-vaccinated, rather than to all.” Parliament will need an additional week of session to pass the necessary law. He even mentions compulsory vaccination for all. A hundred and eighty degree turn. At the last moment, he chose not to mention the mandatory ten-day isolation for positive cases, which he nevertheless intends to enshrine in law. It would have been too much and he felt it. It is his advisers who announce it to us.

The shock. Our fellow citizens, stunned, listen less to the rest. A sequel which, however, is important because the Head of State lists the reforms in preparation. Unemployment insurance, which reduces the rights of the unemployed? Coming into force on October 1, under the nose of the Council of State. A “commitment income” will be created for young people without jobs or training, “based on a logic of duties and rights”. Pension reform? It “will be engaged as soon as the sanitary conditions are met”. Vague formula, which gives him a way of retreat. Without taking gloves, but in a great vagueness, he warns that it will be necessary to “retire later”, that is to say to postpone the retirement age. And adds that special diets will be abolished for new entrants. In ten seconds flat, he puts back on the carpet these two measures which have stumbled over so many hours of negotiations. In return, in a way, the minimum pension will be revalued to a thousand euros. These important announcements, which in other times would put the country on the street, are crushed by the generalization of the health pass. Nobody pays attention to it. “It will infuse”, hope his relatives.

A few minutes after the end of his speech, our compatriots rush to the vaccine sites. In three hours, one million three hundred thousand appointments are made on Doctolib. “We imagined a ripple effect, but not to this extent, rejoices the palace. Sometimes we delayed, but here we act at the beginning of the fourth wave. It had to be very clear.” He will reconfine no matter what. He prefers this new constraint and bets on his acceptance, a new bet. "There will be 5% complainers and 3 or 4% refractory," said the Elysée. No question of a minority making the law, here is the subliminal message.

Emmanuel Macron has opted for the hard way when thirty-five million of our fellow citizens have already received at least one dose. The majority of the country has therefore proven its adherence to vaccination, voted with a needle. It is not certain that the Council of State and the Constitutional Council validate these measures. The only certainty is that France is for once a world pioneer in an unprecedented health screw and it will be imitated. The president is one step ahead of the SNCF, which did not anticipate anything.

In the syringe

The palace knew that this speech would create a shock. Executives and parliamentarians from the majority were invited to follow his speech on a giant screen set up in the village hall. A first. Arriving before 8 p.m., they are asked for their health pass! Some rush to the nearest pharmacy to take a test. Then, hearing their "boss" right in his boots, the elected Walkers are transported. They reunite with the bold of 2017. “Bravo! Finally!" they exclaim. When the president joins them, there is thunderous applause. He, flattered but above all relieved, wears a smile that we haven't seen in a long time. Among them, he talks about the course to be set for the next few months and beyond. Allusion to a second five-year term.

The announcement effect lasts for quite a while. In two days, three million French people make an appointment. The first polls are favourable, two-thirds of respondents approve of the extension of the pass and three-quarters of the vaccination obligation for caregivers. On the opposition side, only LFI and the RN declare themselves against. Emmanuel Macron? The leader of rationals on all sides. Especially since the planned reforms may appeal to the right. Vaccine campaign, presidential campaign, same fight! The ministers follow one another the following days to refine the shooting. Twelve to seventeen year olds will only be asked for a pass from September; the document will also concern terraces, however places of worship will be exempted because of their constitutional protection.

It is also the shock among the “anti”. As of July 14, twenty thousand people demonstrate in several cities to protest against these new obligations, and even against the “dictatorship”. A few days later, their ranks swell and stray into shocking parallels, with some comparing the head of state to Adolf Hitler. The country is divided into two unequal camps: the anti – from the extreme right to the libertarians – and the pro – largely in the majority and from all political stripes. That week, three vaccination centers were vandalized, as well as offices of elected officials. Calls to demonstrate every Saturday are launched. There is a whiff of yellow vests in the air. "The French get vaccinated, let's not get distracted by a tiny minority," minimizes Gabriel Attal. A note from territorial intelligence warns that within this heterogeneous movement is brewing “an increasingly generalized exasperation with measures considered to be draconian”. Authorities expected to see twenty thousand protesters; the following Saturday, they are more than one hundred thousand.

The executive rammed through the law extending the pass. It was time for vaccination to accelerate: two days later, the number of cases jumped to eighteen thousand in twenty-four hours, an increase of 150% in one week. A tsunami much more than a simple wave. And a terrifying development that proves Emmanuel Macron right. In the Assembly, the debates are tense. The government, inflexible, brandishes the threat of reconfinement, the eye riveted on the curves of cases which climb vertically. “You have to measure the rage that you risk triggering”, threatens François Ruffin, when Jean-Luc Mélenchon declares that “it will be an honor to disobey” the past. At the same time, Parliament adopted, to general indifference, two of the major texts of the five-year term, the Climate and Resilience Law and the Law against Separatism.

In the streets, anti-pass, anti-vaccination, anti-mask and anti-containment mingle in protean processions, between yellow vests, supporters of LFI or RN. Their real points in common? A hatred that crystallizes Emmanuel Macron, a distrust of the "media" and the labs, and even, sad recurrence of history, a nauseating scent of anti-Semitism. According to opinion polls, six out of ten of our compatriots condemn the movement but 37% support it.

After a tiring trip to Polynesia, the Head of State put down his suitcases at Fort Brégançon. And invents a new format to address young people, the most undecided and the least vaccinated. Throughout the week, he features in a series of twelve videos – the twelve labors of Hercules! –, shot in selfie mode and posted on Instagram and TikTok social networks. Farewell to gilding, solemn addresses and suits and ties. Welcome black t-shirt, polo shirt and shirt sleeves. He films himself in the living room of the fort, in the garden, the library, and answers questions, including the most far-fetched. Its simplicity pays off: these videos are viewed sixty million times in seven days! Certainly, it does not convince the radical antivax. He even annoys them, without a shadow of a doubt. But can breathe a sigh of relief.

On August 5, the Constitutional Council ratified most of the health law, the last hurdle to overcome, except for the compulsory isolation of patients, which moreover seemed inapplicable. On Monday, August 9, the health pass enters our daily lives, even to take a little cream. At the height of the dispute, two hundred and thirty thousand antipass marched, against forty-three million vaccinated, whose ranks grew by ten million in one month. As August progressed, vaccination finally eradicated the Delta variant and the manifestations gradually subsided.

The Covid-19, its best ally

How to manage this last start of the five-year term, when the Covid hangs on again and again? How to manage this last return to the five-year term, when the time necessary to make major reforms, in reality, no longer exists? Emmanuel Macron is still not officially a candidate for re-election. The president is on the front line, more than ever, and his advisers even warn us that he will increase his trips to explain, again and again, what has been done and what remains to be done. First guideline of its program which does not say – for the time being – its name, France 2030, a major investment plan for the years to come, namely thirty billion over ten years.

Around him, the political landscape is agitated, buzzing with various and varied rumours… Éric Zemmour or not Éric Zemmour? Xavier Bertrand or not Xavier Bertrand after the LR primary in December? The socialist Anne Hidalgo, mayor of Paris who has a hard time crossing the ring road to convince, will soon be in the running. The ecologist Yannick Jadot will emerge, a fragile winner, from an environmental primary more popular than ever. The inevitable, Marine Le Pen and Jean-Luc Mélenchon, are still chomping at the bit, less and less serene.

In his palace, carried by a health crisis which has untied his purse strings, the president is not in a hurry. The impatient that we have been following for more than four years has two trump cards in his game: money and time. He uses it without hesitation. He sows, category by category, disburses gifts and generosity, tries a few inspired flights, plugs one after the other the holes of the quinquennium, extinguishes the sources of fire and serines his balance sheet. A candidate who is advancing less and less in the shadows, he announces his plans, laws and projects for after 2022. Not a program, of course, since, his advisers repeat softly to us, he is not in the campaign. However, behind the scenes, everything is being prepared, from the purchase of chairs and flags to the choice of a logistics manager. But it is far, over there, at the HQ of what the entourage of the head of state calls with a wicked irony: “On the move, it does not work!”

At the palace, we (always) focus on strategy. The catchphrase is well known: the presidential election is the meeting between a man and the French. For Emmanuel Macron, the sky is clear in this strange Indian summer. His popularity rating is high, the highest for a head of state at this time of the quinquennium, and his predecessor, François Hollande, will have the "Confronter" - title of his last opus -, he will not be able to. Nothing. The polls even give the incumbent over 26% in the first round! Yet another strangeness of this mandate like no other. Cynically, the Covid-19, from its worst enemy, has become its best ally. He installs him in the center of all eyes, allows him to appear as an essential war leader. After the achievement, as planned in mid-August, of the objective of forty million vaccinated thanks to the health pass effect, the fifty million are finally exceeded in mid-September. Admittedly, all reforms are relegated to the background. But it may be better this way, when we look carefully at what the promises of the candidate confronted with the reality of power can provoke.

In mid-January, Emmanuel Macron will be president – ​​for a time – of the Union. What Euro-experts call the PFUE, the French presidency of the European Union. Admittedly, this is purely formal. But he intends to make it a major event. Use this weapon against eurosceptics, LFI and RN as a priority, of course. At the palace, no one doubts it, it will be the occasion for a “big” speech on the Union and many summits at home. The opportunity also to bring back to him the debates on the security and protection of European borders against migrants, or even on ecology.

Visionary, of course, but also pragmatic. Emmanuel Macron occupies every inch of ground. We accompany him to Marseille, an angry and fallow coastal city, whose fracture with Parisian verticality has worsened since the Covid. He devotes a long three-day trip to it, to promise a major aid plan of one and a half billion euros. In a city in the northern districts, carefully cleaned before his arrival, he is greeted by a crowd filled with expectation. He listens to a group of women denouncing the violence. His usual technique? Do not advance and multiply the questions. “He drowned us in basic questions, which his advisers would know how to answer very well,” complains one of them, a fine fly. But I also hear him shouting to a grumbling unemployed worker, in the middle of a crowd: “Are you ready to work in the restaurant business? Yes? Even if it's hard? There are places!” Stubborn and resentful, the candidate who is not… And who takes advantage of this trip to the second city of the country to launch an experiment on education. He wants to suggest that school principals choose their teachers. A liberal idea that he has cherished for a long time. Her name? The school of the future. Almost a campaign slogan. At least one idea that preempts, here again, the debate.

The most threatening smoldering fire? Rising energy prices: gas, petrol and electricity. That of gas is likely to quadruple, and with it that of electricity, indexed to the price of gas at European level. Emmanuel Macron knows that this expense hides all the windfalls distributed elsewhere. The memory of the Yellow Vests and the spark of the rise in diesel is still very present. Neither one nor two, Jean Castex announced on September 3 a “shield” to temporarily freeze electricity and gas prices. Cost? Five billion euros in tax losses for the State from 2022. Three weeks later, the checkbook comes out again: one hundred euros per person for the thirty-eight million of our fellow citizens who earn less than two thousand euros net per month . In order not to let the reasons for anger flare up, the president renounces his credo of reserving aid for the poorest. A four billion offensive in the war against the "felt" and to deal with the most urgent.

Finally, outside the borders, it is neither more complicated nor simpler. Impossible, “at the same time”, to try to calm relations with Algeria and to reduce the number of visas, in order to force Algiers to resume its illegal immigrants. Candidate neither right nor left, but rather right-wing president, on September 28, Emmanuel Macron decided to halve the visas granted to Algeria and Morocco, but also by 30% those of Tunisia. An unprecedented, firm measure, a retaliation and pressure that his predecessors had not dared to apply.

On the other hand, he is losing all control over some fragile diplomatic scaffolding. His hope for a Paris-Canberra-New Delhi axis is dashed against a new Canberra-London-Washington pact, says Aukus. An agreement concluded in the greatest secrecy which leads to the rupture, overnight, of the "contract of the century" of 2016, which was to see France supply twelve conventional submarines to Australia for fifty-five billion euros . Emmanuel Macron learns of it on September 15, barely three hours before the announcement becomes public, in the middle of lunch with the Crown Prince of Abu Dhabi, Mohammed Ben Zayed, at the Château de Fontainebleau. He immediately returns to the Élysée, furious. A major setback for tricolor diplomacy. A loss of five hundred jobs for Naval Group. Admittedly, he is asking for the recall of the French ambassadors to Washington and Canberra, something never seen before, but the damage is done. The contract is lost, the weak support of the European allies does not change anything. Another diplomatic disappointment, after the failure to create an effective Sahelian armed force against the jihadists in the Sahel and the partial withdrawal of Barkhane, in particular in the face of anti-French sentiment. Not to mention the chaotic situation in Lebanon.

Marseille, October 15, a disillusioned short sentence on French quirks: “I know us better. It is always the same people who take part in the meetings and the others, after two months, will say that they have been excluded.” A month before, to the day, before the Congress of Independents, Emmanuel Macron drew the robot portrait of this function he has held for five years: “Being president means being yelled at. When a problem disappears from the shouting matches, it is beginning to be solved, but there is never any respite. However, it is both its complexity and its richness, in front of the firefighters of Marseille, it does not let go. Standing in the storm. Determined not to give up anything. Convinced of having a mission. "Don't give in to the zeitgeist! Do not give in to the spirit of defeat, of division! Do not yield anything to those who resign themselves!” Even if it means being alone, alone against everyone. The solitary of the palace.

Also read: The Yellow Vests, a media construction? : Emmanuel Macron's strategic and political mistakes in the face of the social storm

Excerpt from the book by Laurence Benhamou, “Le solitaire du Palais. Le Livre du quinquennium Macron 2017-2022”, published by Robert Laffont.

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