World News: French President Emmanuel Macron’s Popularity Nosedives

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Category: World News - Europe

Published on Monday, 01 May 2023 12:21

Written by Olivier Longhi

Few French presidents have been so unpopular after a year in office. But Emmanuel Macron, willingly presented as the slayer of the old world, has become the scapegoat of a nation frightened by the irreversible mutations surrounding it.

Isolated, brocaded, awaited by concerts of pots and pans during his travels, his effigy sometimes burned in the public square, it appears from reading all these elements, that the President of the Republic Emmanuel Macron is certainly going through to date the most difficult beginning of mandate he has had to assume, one year after being re-elected.

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The reasons for this unpopularity are for many obvious and have their roots first in the pension reform that raised the legal retirement age to 64, then in the use of Article 49.3 of the Constitution so that the text can be definitively adopted.

Consequently, some would consider that the withdrawal of the reform would be enough to ease social tensions and would allow the President of the Republic to reconnect with French people more than angry at him. However, nothing is less certain because implicit in the background emerges a more insidious question that would tend to minimize the impact of the said reform.

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Scapegoat and Dependency

And if the President of the Republic, elected after a presidential campaign during which he explained that he wanted to reform the pension system, turned out to be only the a scapegoat of a nation unconsciously frightened by   the effects of globalization and more broadly by a world that has been constantly changing   for more than twenty years now, a world in which it is not.

More than one nation among many, facing savage economic competition and in which it is struggling to impose itself?

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The issue is not neutral and brings the country back to its social and economic reality. Admittedly, the France is praised, and rightly, for its quality and its art of living, but by scrutinizing with   more attention the international position of the France, it appears only   as a   middle   power, unable to act alone in the Ukrainian issue, more or less anchored to the foreign policy of the United States,   economically dependent on major players such as China, Germany, the United States and the European Union.

All these realities bordering on concession push the country to espouse a position of follower rather than actor, forced to adapt   rather than print its own rhythm. If the   pension reform has crystallized all the discontent that many French people have with the President of the Republic, the tensions born of these same neighboring countries where, for   an equal and comparable system, the legal retirement age (Italy, United Kingdom, Spain) has been raised to 67.  

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Admittedly, a more detailed   analysis where economic structures would   make it possible to balance this comparison , but would not the attachment of the French to a departure at 62 years of age be part of a   fight specific to the picaresque novel where a Don Quixote improbable would come to break the mills of the reform wanted by the President of the Republic, no one can dispute, but which   is perhaps also part of a logic of greater wingspan which pushes the France to put itself at the fold of the majority and not of its only exception.

Endless debate would argue some but the reality is also obvious: the France long judged as an exception in the world   because of its history (not always glorious either) is perhaps now forced to return to the rank of anonymity and to bend, in spite of itself, to the twenty-first century.    

Bio: Olivier Longhi has extensive experience in European history. A seasoned journalist with fifteen years of experience, he is currently professor of history and geography in the Toulouse region of France. He has held a variety of publishing positions, including Head of Agency and Chief of Publishing. A journalist, recognized blogger, editor, and editorial project manager, he has trained and managed editorial teams, worked as a journalist for various local radio stations, a press and publishing consultant, and a communications consultant.