Macron faces a difficult Autumn – but he’ll pull through

As Oscar Wilde might have put it, the only thing worse than trying to govern with a small majority is trying to govern with a large majority.

The great Irish dramatist, who died in poverty in France, might also have observed that to lose one senior minister from one’s government may be regarded as a misfortune, but to lose two, plus the head of one’s parliamentary majority, looks like carelessness.

But this is where Macron is today. On August 28, Nicolas Hulot, a well-respected and popular broadcaster, resigned as France’s environment minister on the grounds that his boss’s rhetoric on saving the planet was not matched by action on the ground. That was bad enough, especially when Hulot revealed his decision not in person, but on television – the cheek of the man! Then, just yesterday, Gérard Collomb, the Interior Minister ­– more important in some respects than even the Prime Minister – announced, in a magazine interview, that he, too, was leaving, in his case to join the fight for his old job as mayor of Lyon.

Lyon? It was Sir Thomas More, in A Man for All Seasons, who when informed by his protegée Richie Rich that he was deserting him in his time of trial to take up the post of attorney-general for Wales, responded, “For Wales? Why Richard, it profit a man nothing to give his soul for the whole world … but for Wales!”.

In fact, the 71-year-old Collomb, who had run France’s second city for 17 years until answering the Élysée’s siren call, clearly feels that being mayor is a better job than being holed up in the Hôtel de Beauvau, responsible for the security of a state whose President appears to believe that he is the state.

In Collomb’s case, insult has been added to injury, by the minister’s almost casual disclosure that he would go at a moment of his own choosing, after the race for the mairie in Lyon starts to get serious. Just days earlier, Macron and his wife, Brigitte, had wined and dined him in a a bid to get him to change his mind. But to no avail. Now the bitching has begun, with hints from on high that Collomb isn’t really up to the job anyway, having failed earlier in the summer to inform the President that his head of security Alexandre Benalla – since fired and placed under investigation by the Senate – was a bad ’un, who had dressed up as a police officer on May Day and proceeded to beat up demonstrators.

Another straw in the wind came this week when Richard Ferrand, Macron’s choice as Speaker of the National Assembly, was voted out of office after little more than a year in favour of his rival, Gilles le Gendre, a deputy for the second circonscription of Paris, which includes the Assembly itself. Ferrand was regarded as a loyalist and a safe pair of hands, who could be relied on to keep errant deputies in check. But the worm has turned. Le Gendre, a former journalist, is very much in the same mould as his predecessor, but crucially, with the party’s groundlings determined not to be seen as cannon fodder, he is viewed as a good Assembly man rather than a Macron intimate.

All this while the Socialist Party has virtually ceased to exist, the Front National (now the Rassemblement National) in flux and the conservative Republicans essentially leaderless!

It could, and probably should, have been very different. Last June, La République En Marche, the synthetic party created by Macron on the back of an envelope to give practical effect to his ambitious national reform programme, won 312 out of the Assembly’s 577 seats. Additional support was provided by the Mouvement Democratique (MoDem), led by the veteran centrist François Bayrou, which emerged from the elections with 41 deputies.

In theory, the new President, not then 40, should have been able to do much as he pleased. Only Jacques Chirac, in the history of the Fifth Republic, had secured a greater legislative cushion, and then only by eight seats, and in 2002 Chirac, as one of the wiliest political operators of the age, was the beneficiary not only of a booming economy but of a European Union convinced that its recently introduced single currency and impending enlargement to the East were guarantors of a new Golden Age.

Macron’s arrival on the scene coincided with a much gloomier prognosis for France and Europe. The new man was perceived not as an impresario, or actor-manager, in the manner of Chirac and, before him, François Mitterrand. Rather he was seen by a rather desperate and confused electorate as a necessary corrective to the absurd Nicolas Sarkozy (the King of Bling) and François Hollande (“Monsieur Normal”), who, against a background of financial shocks and Islamist outrages, had allowed France to sleepwalk into something close to irrelevance.

Macron certainly presented himself as a saviour, with the party he had concocted providing the legislative muscle that would allow him to dismember the unions, tear up the country’s antiquated labour laws and remove millions of civil servants and municipal employees from the bloated public sector payroll.

It was as if he saw En Marche as the orchestra that would play his groundbreaking composition, the Concerto Révolutionnaire, while he, as the soloist, sat at the grand piano, sweat pouring from his brow, ready to milk the applause.

Instead, he and En Marche have lost several by-elections and are struggling to maintain unity in the face of their leader’s vanity. Just this week, visitors to an Open Day at the Élysée Palace were enthralled by a snatched conversation between Macron and a young man trying, and failing, to get a job in his chosen field of horticulture, for which he had trained for several years. “You should go to Montparnasse,” he was told. There are lots of bars and restaurants there where you could find a job.”

But we should not get ahead of ourselves. Macron has only been in power since May last year. Already he has seen off the rail unions, begun the weary business of updating the tax code (in favour of the rich, many would say) and prepared the ground for employment law reform and cuts in public sector numbers. At the same time, he has established himself, in the wake of Angela Merkel’s domestic travails, as probably the leading European head of state and its foremost champion of integration.

It is not as if the French give any of their leaders an easy time. As Hollande remarked recently, you come in on a wave of hope and, after leaving office, are remembered with fondness for at least having tried to get things done. “It is the bit in between that is the problem.” A poll in Le Figaro this week showed that while Macron’s popularity has fallen to a meagre 19 per cent, a majority (67 per cent) accept that the President is motivated principally by a desire to reform France, while fully half believe that he should not give up, but  press ahead with his programme. That they will oppose his efforts tooth and nail is neither here nor there. As we know, the French vote for change only with the assurance that everything will remain the same.

Having endured an awkward summer, and with the pesky Benalla affair as yet unresolved, Macron is said now to have got his second wind and to be getting ready for a busy autumn. The main features of the coming months – Brexit aside – are likely to be an increase in trade union agitation and further bellyaching from Left and Right in the Assembly.

So no change there.

If another senior minister were to go – perhaps announcing the fact on Twitter or Instagram – things could still reach a pretty pass. But the Jupiter President is nothing if not secure in his own skin. He is ready for the fight.