Fight extremes, he said. Let’s remember 2017. “My responsibility will be to allay fears, I will fight with all my might against the division that is undermining us and bringing us down,” Emmanuel Macron announced on the evening of his election.
Five years later, the result is not conclusive. The National Rally could have a group in the National Assembly on June 19 for the first time since 1986-1988, when the voting system was proportional. Jean-Luc Mélenchon leads the left on land very far from its bases, at the cost of all the higher bids.
This president, who would like to be singular to the point of being unique, is like his predecessors. If he managed a real personal performance in April, he did not perform a political miracle. There is obviously a responsibility that goes beyond him: the era is one of radicalism, which Western democracies do not know how to counter. But there is also one that catches up with him. In recent months, Emmanuel Macron has sometimes given the impression that politics is a game. Here, what if we borrowed the slogan of the New Anti-Capitalist Party in the middle of a meeting, “Our lives are worth more than their profits”!
He let people believe that the way forward in the medium term mattered so much less than defeating the adversary the next day, so he piled up the ideological zigzags. Here, and if the day after the first round of the presidential election, we multiplied winks supported to Jean-Luc Mélenchon, to better pillory him a few weeks later! He played with fire. It’s up to him to put out the fire.
