Macron making waves
EMMANUEL Macron’s entry to the French presidential stage was about as exciting and theatrical as electoral politics gets. He seized the Élysée Palace and the National Assembly with huge majorities. At 39, he was the youngest French head of state since Napoléon, promising radical economic change while restoring the presidency to a Jupiterian level.
After so grand an entrance, and with so ambitious a programme, there was bound to be pushback. And it has begun.
Surprisingly, the first of what promises to be a tough series of domestic confrontations was with the military. Facing budget cuts equivalent to nearly $1 billion, the top general of the French armed forces, Pierre de Villiers, used an epithet before a parliamentary committee and quit. Macron struck back at a military garden party, telling the generals: “I am the boss.”
The strife is likely to get worse as Macron works to cut more than five times that much from this year’s overall budget and more for 2018. The French have long understood the need to trim their spending, but every cut is fiercely, and often successfully, resisted. Town mayors are up in arms against cuts to local government budgets, university professors are furious about cuts to their funding, and an overhaul to pension and labour laws is certain to bring down the wrath of the unions.
The question is whether de Villiers’s resignation is good or bad for Macron. On the negative side, the first public resistance to his programme was from the military and against the first president never to have served in the army, and at a time when thousands of soldiers are deployed around the country against terrorist attacks. Critics inevitably assailed him for what another general termed “juvenile authoritarianism”.
But the first skirmish also demonstrated a president prepared to stand his ground. Lesser senior officials may not be as likely to openly rebel. Macron’s ratings and those of his prime minister, Édouard Philippe, remain high, and polls show a public ready for change.
None of what Macron is doing should be a surprise; it was all there in his campaign, and the French voted overwhelmingly for him. He came to office keenly aware that unless reforms are started immediately, they will not happen. The power of Jupiterian symbols make for grand political theatre, but the real action has only begun.