Emmanuel Macron continues his offensive to try to turn the page on pension reform. On the occasion of the first anniversary of his re-election, Monday, the President of the Republic announces his intention to “reengage” all over the place in public debate, and defends the principle of a major law on immigration.
In a long exchange with eleven “readers-interviewers” of Parisien-Aujourd’hui in France, carried out on Friday April 21 at the Elysée Palace and posted online on Sunday April 23 at the end of the afternoon, the Head of State answers on many topics, from the executive’s balance sheet to future projects, including the possibility of seeing Marine Le Pen succeed him in 2027.
Very set back on the pension file, Emmanuel Macron believes that he should have “more [se] wet” on the flagship reform of his second five-year term. “Perhaps the mistake was not being present enough to give consistency and carry this reform myself,” he says. The Head of State also affirms, without extending beyond measure, that his Prime Minister, Elisabeth Borne, has his “confidence” and “does his job well in a difficult moment”.
On the merits of the reform, the president once again defends a “necessary” evolution, adding: “Pension reforms are always difficult. Since there have been, they always go wrong. So it’s always better to do it at the beginning of the mandate. »
“I have to re-engage in public debate because there are things that are unclear. So I do it everywhere, ”also launches Emmanuel Macron, who has given himself “a hundred days” to relaunch a deadlocked mandate and has begun to return to rub shoulders with the French and their discontent on the ground. Conspired during a walkabout in Alsace, followed wherever it is announced by demonstrators and their concerts of saucepans, Emmanuel Macron rejects the trials of “contempt” and claims to accept the challenge. But he also adds that he wants to “fight against violence and incivility”, calling for “sanctioning” those who cut off the power to the places where he travels.
To the French, the head of state still predicts difficult times on the inflation front, without announcing new immediate measures to deal with it. “Food prices are going to be tough until the end of the summer,” he warns, as year-on-year food prices continued to accelerate, climbing 15.9% in March, after 14.8% in February.
Faced with soaring prices, the Head of State pleads for “work to pay better”, throwing the ball back to “employers” and “social dialogue”.
“I demand a balance sheet for [the purchasing power of] the middle class: the abolition of the housing tax and the TV license fee (…) and the reduction of more than 4 billion euros on the first tranches of income tax,” he further points out.
“I want an effective and fair law, in one piece of legislation that strikes that balance,” the president said. In his speech of March 22, he had however explained that he wanted to split the project into “several texts” to keep only the most consensual aspects, for lack of an absolute majority in the National Assembly. But the maneuver had also aroused hostility on the right and on the left, the Minister of the Interior, Gérald Darmanin, pleading himself last week for “a strong bill”.
“The ‘at the same time’ is not an ambiguity. When you are on this ridge path, you are attacked in stereo, those who say “it is too soft” and those who claim “it is awful” ”, quipped Emmanuel Macron in the interview published by Le Parisien-Aujourd’hui in France, lamenting an “often caricatural” debate around immigration.
“We must be more demanding in terms of integration, defend French secularism,” he pleads. “On the immigration side, our procedures are far too long. Deadlines explode, people end up finding work, settling down and being protected by other rules. So it doesn’t work anymore, ”said the president.
Emmanuel Macron wants a “gradual increase” of universal national service (SNU), with “more territories that will adopt it”, but “without making it compulsory throughout the country overnight”. “You have to go through the law to make it mandatory, but before you have to finalize the consultation,” he explains.
“I don’t think it can be made mandatory across the country overnight,” because of the “logistical challenge” it would present. The president specifies that the SNU would initially apply in “a few departments, then a little more”.
“It’s an approach that recreates the collective, a rite where we mix all regions and categories,” he recalls about this major national service project which was launched in 2019 in a targeted manner. For the moment, it only concerns young volunteers (32,000 in 2022), even if the idea is to eventually make it universal, and therefore generalized and compulsory.
The Head of State had promised in his vows of December 31, 2022 to lay “in the next few weeks or months the first milestones of a universal national service”. “I will have the opportunity to come back to this in the coming weeks,” he reaffirmed on January 20. But in early April, the project seemed hit by the mobilization against the pension reform.
It was originally planned to include elements of financing concerning this project in the military programming law (LPM) presented on April 4 in the Council of Ministers. However, “given the context of mobilization among young people, the UNS would be the fuel that ignites the fire”, it was said at the Ministry of the Armed Forces.
Asked about his promise to unclog the emergency room, made during his televised address on April 17, the president assures us that “the overcrowding of the emergency room, the medical deserts, it’s the same problem: we no longer have enough caregivers in the country “.
The Head of State relies on the training of health professionals, the acceleration of the “delegation of acts” (and to quote the “prescription of certain drugs open to pharmacists, sight checks by opticians, etc.”) ). It also echoes an important concern of caregivers: the fact that an increasing number of patients are not honoring the appointments they make, thus blocking consultation slots. “We are going to sanction them a little”, announces Emmanuel Macron.
The Head of State confirms in this interview his wish to launch “a major ecological restoration project” of schools which, too often, are “thermal sieves, where children freeze them and then get too hot”. “We are going to put the funding on it to support the municipalities which cannot do it alone”, he adds, without detailing an envelope or a precise timetable.
The president had already announced in November 2022 his intention to take an “initiative” on the subject. “It’s a great public project. This will give work to the construction industry, it will help the municipalities because we will support them, it will reduce our greenhouse gas emissions and our children will work in good conditions, ”argues Emmanuel Macron.
The Head of State also says he wants to accelerate “the revegetation of schoolyards”, seeing it as “a great way to have cool wells in the heart of our cities and to educate our children from the start about the environment” .
“In too many demonstrations, there are people who have a political project to destroy institutions, who break urban equipment” and who “sometimes seriously injure our law enforcement”, according to the head of state, who says, “I will be intractable with these people. »
While a reader of Le Parisien-Aujourd’hui en France said, about the police, “we nevertheless have the impression that we let it happen…”, Emmanuel Macron replied: “That’s wrong. I defend our law enforcement. “I also reject the term police violence,” he said, referring to “very isolated cases” that “must be punished.”
Emmanuel Macron affirms that he is “not in favor of the abolition of the post of Prime Minister”, unlike his predecessor, François Hollande, within the framework of a reform of the institutions for which he submits “several questions to reflection “.
Confirming its desire to move forward on the subject of institutions, while the President of the Senate, Gérard Larcher (Les Républicains), and that of the National Assembly, Yaël Braun-Pivet (Renaissance), believe that the project is not for the time not a priority, the Head of State explains that he will “send a proposal to them”, “to see what there would be a way on”.
The president also highlights “the question of popular sovereignty”. “Should we open or not the field of the referendum, the referendum of shared initiative (RIP)? Do we need more proportionality in the Assembly? Should we move towards a regulation of assemblies that avoids blocking without going to the situation that we have known? he wonders. He also mentions the “reform of our judicial authority” and “that of a real decentralization”.
Emmanuel Macron believes in this interview that “Marine Le Pen will come [to power] if we do not know how to respond to the challenges of the country and if we install a habit of lying or denial of reality”. The head of state assures that he does not have “lessons to learn” on this subject because he “beat her twice”, in the second round of the presidential elections of 2017 and 2022.
Does he imagine being accompanied by Marine Le Pen to the steps of the Elysée Palace in 2027?, asks a reader. “There are a lot of people who make this political fiction and who do it well on the short scale”, laments the president, recalling nevertheless that four years before 2017, “nobody imagined for a single second” to see him elected.
Emmanuel Macron argues that “we will never win” against the National Rally “at the game of the most populist and demagogue”, but thanks to the “projects of reindustrialization, ecology, order and the fight for our public services “. “If we manage to win the reindustrialization site, we will get people out of despair, misery and anger. If we manage to win the project of ecology, order, the fight for our public services, we will have people who will return to the republican field, ”he hopes.
