The French recognize Macron’s speech with the sound of a cooking pot

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It was something of the lockdown: on Monday at 8 p.m., noise was made in France – but there was no applause for the nursing staff, but protest rumors with cooking pots against President Emmanuel Macron (45) and his pension reform. At the same time, he gave one of his crisis speeches, with a small part of regret and a large part of promises that things should get better in the near future.

“No one – least of all me – can remain deaf to these demands for social justice,” Macron said. In the eyes of many French people, however, the president has played a deaf role in the past three months.

Macron, who was confirmed in office a year ago, is faced with a huge pile of shards. Although he continued his reform project, with which he wanted to make a name for himself as a good student at EU level, the disappointment in the country runs deep. The image of a transfer of power to the right-wing populist Marine Le Pen (54) in 2027 is becoming increasingly clear.

The majority of the French do not like Macron

“She gets to 39 percent approval, which has never happened before,” says pollster Brice Teinturier (60). “It is clear that the Rassemblement National benefits most from the crisis,” he added. Le Pen had done nothing but wait and show that his rejection of the reform was less radical than the populists on the left.

Macron started with a promise not to give the French a reason to vote for extremes – but so far he has achieved the exact opposite. More than 70 percent of the French currently have a bad opinion of him. Many of his closest advisers and supporters have since turned their backs.

With his TV speech, Macron wanted to try to open a new chapter. He wanted to “rebuild, recover the spirit of the nation,” he said in the tense tone of a teacher who wants to inspire uninterested students.

The measures he listed were mainly formulated with the right-wing electorate in mind: more gendarmes, fight against illegal immigration, benefit recipients back on the labor market, fight against social security and tax fraud. Macron left no doubt in which camp he would look for his partners in the future to gain a majority.

Macron’s speech on “construction sites”.

Those who oppose the reform probably didn’t even listen to Macron’s speech. “A large part of the population is no longer accessible to him,” says Teinturier.

Macron repeated his invitation to the social partners “starting tomorrow”. He wanted to talk to them about how to improve working conditions, how to increase the employment of seniors, how to prevent people from exhausting themselves in their work.

But it’s probably too late for that now. CGT union leader Sophie Binet (41) only shrugged at the suggestion. “LOL” (translated: I’m laughing my ass off), she replied curtly.

Macron became downright pathetic at the end of his ten-minute speech: no one believed him when he promised to rebuild the fire-damaged Notre-Dame cathedral in Paris within five years. “But we can do it,” Macron said. “And that’s exactly how it should be on the country’s biggest construction sites,” he yelled into the camera. In a hundred days, just in time for the national holiday on July 14, he wants to take stock.

If the president has achieved one thing with his pension reform, it is the unity of the formerly divided unions. On May 1, they called for protest events together again for the first time. That was last the case in 2002, when it came to blocking the far-right Jean-Marie Le Pen from entering the Elysée, who surprisingly made it to the second round. The 94-year-old is currently in hospital with heart problems. His daughter Marine Le Pen could one day achieve what her father failed to achieve. (AFP)

Source: Blick