The scene takes place in late 2011 or possibly 2012 – memories are hazy – at the bar of the Crown Plaza Hotel. The two protagonists meet for the first time. One is an investment banker, he is part of François Hollande’s campaign team and is slowly starting to weave his web. The other is one of the right arms of François Chérèque, the leader of the CFDT. He is responsible for employment and integration issues, and negotiator in charge of the unemployment insurance file. The meeting between Emmanuel Macron and Laurent Berger, two more shadow figures, is going well.

Ten years later, the President of the Republic and the boss of the CFDT occupy center stage. And clash in a final battle, that of pensions. To tell the secret story of this conflict which has brought millions of people to the streets in his book The Battle of Pensions (Robert Laffont), in bookstores on June 29, Cécile Amar, political journalist at France Télévisions, goes back history, that “of a president who had theorized the death of the unions and who found himself facing a historic social movement led by the unions”.

From the first confrontations under the Hollande government to the announcement of Laurent Berger’s departure last spring, the relationship between the two men serves as a common thread in this vitriolic autopsy of a broken link between power and the unions. On the one hand, a Jupiterian executive who wants to relegate them to the back of the court. A revealing episode resurfaced: during the 2017 campaign, Macron responded to the CFDT’s invitation with a video in which he strangled the intermediary bodies. On the other side, unions trying somehow not to be knocked down.

The pen is lively and the story is uncompromising for an executive who seems deaf to warnings. Cécile Amar extols trade unionists. Laurent Berger and Philippe Martinez become modern-day heroes. We can regret this absence of nuances. But the book draws a nevertheless relevant assessment of the battle. Victorious, the government seems weakened. Defeated, the unions have meanwhile regained the lead. And after ? Laurent Berger, who has just left the head of the CFDT, delivers his prophecy in the epilogue: “He never listens. It is very dangerous for the next four years. It can end very badly. »