Insecurity, skepticism and tomatoes. Macron’s new mission begins in disgrace

In Sunday’s presidential election, Emmanuel Macron clearly defeated his rival Marine Le Pen, but failed to win with the French.

The proof is a survey that BFM television ordered along with the weekly Express from Elabe. According to him, 55 percent of those polled think that Macron’s election is bad news for their country. Perhaps not surprisingly, this view is mainly shared by voters Le Pen and the third man on the standings, the far-left politician Jean-Luke Mélenchon.

The conciliatory words Macron uttered under the Eiffel Tower on election night did not seem to fall on fertile ground. The announced effort to unite the nation and his promise to not forget his opponents’ voters clearly did not convince many people – according to the poll, 68 percent of French people think Macron will not change either in style or in content. your politics.

One of the president’s priorities will be ecological transformation, that is, the transition to renewable energy sources. Macron has been that way before, but this time he wants to subordinate the entire government to the environmental program and, with that in mind, elect a new prime minister, a successor to the somewhat obscure Jean Castex, which will end.

However, during his first term, Macron behaved like a politician who constantly talked about ecological transformation and assumed the role of world leader in the fight against global warming, but concrete actions were somehow lacking.

That’s why groups of environmental activists began touring French schools and tearing up portraits of the president three years ago.

The popular Environment Minister at the time, Nicolas Hulot, quickly resigned from the government to protest the government’s inaction in the fight against climate change. 57 percent of French people now do not believe that Macron’s second five-year plan will truly be environmentally friendly.

The president’s first trip outside of Paris didn’t go smoothly either – he went on Wednesday to the city of Cergy, where, in his own words, “economic, social and security problems” were intensifying.

Mélenchon clearly won the first round of the presidential election (48 percent of the vote), while Macron won the second round, but turnout was over 36 percent (against 28 percent nationwide).

While the president was arguing with the citizens in a crowd, several cherry tomatoes flew towards his head. They did not hit Macron in the head, and the security guards around him immediately hid him under an umbrella.

It’s a funny incident, but perhaps a harbinger that public opposition to Macron has not waned much, and that his upcoming tenure may be as complex as his first. Just a reminder – the yellow vest movement in the country emerged in the fall of 2018, a year and a half after Macron’s first election in May 2017.

In addition to the government changes, the French political scene is also vibrant with the upcoming parliamentary elections. It is these that should set the limits of Macron’s next second term.

Negotiations take place predominantly on the left. The disastrous outcome of the Socialist Party’s presidential candidate, Anna Hidalgo, has convinced the ruling party that, without many years of pre-election alliances, it could end up just as badly in the June elections. The Socialists are therefore dealing with the Greens, but also with Mélenchon’s Inflexible France movement.

Prior to the merger, former President François Hollande warned that in such a case the Socialist Party would be in danger of extinction. Hollande faced the conditions of the Mélenchonites, where the Socialists themselves would not be candidates in 2/3 to 3/4 of the French departments. Thus, they would have to give up their biggest advantage, which was a nationwide long-term anchorage. Hollande proposes instead to vote only with the Greens and Communists. But the Communists are now only a very marginal party, and even in the case of an alliance with the Greens, the Socialists would have to make painful concessions.

The fourth man in the presidential election, Eric Zemmour, wants some integration on the right. In the parliamentary elections, he announced that the Recapture movement would not field its candidates in constituencies in which Marine Le Pen, Sovereign Nicolas Dupont-Aignan or Republican Éric Ciotti (the defeated candidate in the Republican primaries) were seeking seats.

But the National Unity rejected the pre-election coalition’s offer: Jordan Bardella, number two among the Lepenovci, bluntly told Zemmour, “There will be no party unity.”