Francuska - predsednički izbori

Emmanuel Macron Will Be Yet Another Failed French President
By CHRIS BICKERTON
SEPT. 7, 2017


President Emmanuel Macron of France is liberalism’s new poster boy. Hailed as the answer to Europe’s populist tide, he has brought a buzz back into French diplomacy by facing down President Trump and President Vladimir Putin of Russia. “The Macron method,” a leading European think tank gushed recently, is the new Third Way, threading the needle between technocracy and populism.

At home in France, it’s a very different story. A recent poll found that Mr. Macron’s popularity fell by 14 points in August, after a fall of 10 points in July. Only 40 percent of respondents said they were satisfied with the president’s performance.

To be fair, Mr. Macron never had much popular support to begin with. In the first round of the presidential election in April, when the vote was split among four main contenders, he won just under 24 percent. (By comparison, François Hollande received 28 percent of the vote in the first round in 2012. Nicolas Sarkozy won 31 percent in 2007.) Mr. Macron won the second round handily, but only because he was the lesser-evil candidate in the runoff — his competitor was Marine Le Pen, the leader of the far-right populist National Front party.

Electoral arithmetic explains only so much. Mr. Macron’s popularity suffers from something more fundamental: Macronism. His entire political project has been far too focused on his personality. Much of his appeal has come from his youth, his dynamism, his good looks and his oratorical skills. This hyper-personalized approach always carried the risk that once his charm wore off, there would be nothing left for his supporters to like, which is exactly what is happening.

Since taking office, Mr. Macron has put off many people by trying to recapture the grandeur of the presidency. In a phrase that may stick to him for the rest of his time in office, he said he wanted to make the presidency more “Jupiterian,” comparing himself with the powerful Roman god Jupiter, who ruled the skies. When he brought the Senate and Parliament together at the Versailles palace and spoke to them about his ambitions for the presidency, many in France bristled at the monarchical overtones.

This arrogant attitude about power has destroyed the anti-establishment, upstart image that Mr. Macron cultivated during the campaign. The post-ideological platform on which he ran is starting to reveal itself for what it really is: an emptiness at the heart of his political project.

Mr. Macron’s two big policy goals are fixing the economy and fixing Europe. He has gone so far as to describe his economic policies as a “Copernican revolution,” but he is merely pushing France a little farther down the road of labor market deregulation and fiscal austerity, a path well trodden by other countries.

The new president says he is determined to make France a “start-up nation,” borrowing the vapid parlance of Silicon Valley. This has won him the support of venture capitalists and tech billionaires but has yet to convince the wider French public. Silicon Valley’s libertarian social contract, with its cavalier attitude toward inequality, sits uneasily with a population raised on France’s postwar social-democratic traditions.

His main goal is to reduce France’s unemployment rate, which at around 10 percent remains stubbornly high. He hopes to do this by reforming the labor code. One of the new measures is a cap on the damages that courts can award workers claiming wrongful dismissal, a move intended to give employers more confidence in hiring. Another would allow companies with fewer than 50 employees to negotiate contracts without having to go through trade unions. The French far left has called this a “social coup d’état,” but the president has been careful not to give in entirely to the business lobby.

What really matters is the endpoint. Any sustained fall in unemployment in France would be welcome, but the experiences of other countries suggest it comes at the cost of new kinds of inequality. In Germany, labor market reforms have led to a proliferation of “mini-jobs,” part-time work that is lightly regulated and has taken the place of full-time jobs in some sectors. In Britain’s highly deregulated labor market, record employment levels exist alongside low productivity, stagnating wages and a proliferation of short-term contracts. Is this the future France wants?

Not since the economic boom of the 1950s and ’60s has capitalism in Europe been dynamic enough to combine high levels of employment with long-term material gains for the masses. Today, choices involve painful trade-offs. Mr. Macron’s economic policies favor employers over workers and chip away at what remains of the French welfare state.

But fearful of giving his program any actual political content, the president wraps up his reforms in the European flag. He tells French voters that only if they make these sacrifices at home, the rest of the European Union — especially Germany — will take them seriously and give France a better deal.

Mr. Macron’s European plans include a common budget and finance minister for the eurozone. His ideas have received warm words from Berlin, and there are signs that such a deal could be possible after Germany has its federal elections on Sept. 24. But if Chancellor Angela Merkel wins, her mandate will not be for a European fiscal union where German tax revenues are placed in a common European pot. She has given her support to only a very modest version of what Mr. Macron is proposing. The payoff for all of France’s sacrifice at home will be small — and the president will surely be no more popular than he is now.

Mr. Macron’s success in June’s presidential election has shaken up the moribund political landscape in a deep and lasting way. For that, he deserves thanks. But as a political project, Macronism is little more than rhetoric and hubris, backed up with conventional neoliberal policies. For now, Mr. Macron is still the darling of the global liberal elite, but his growing unpopularity gives us a better picture of what he has to offer.

Photo: AFP

When French President Emmanuel Macron sniffed a whiff of marijuana during his visit to the overseas territory of French Guiana, he joked: "I still have a nose".

"So, there are some of you who do not only smoke cigarettes, huh?", he said to laughter after posing for photos with locals in the Crique neighbourhood of capital Cayenne on Friday night.

"That will not help with your schoolwork," he could be heard telling the smokers on a video posted on the presidential Facebook page.

"You have to tell the youngest!" he said.

Macron wraps up his 48-hour visit to the impoverished South American territory, which borders northern Brazil, on Saturday.

POLICY Roundtable 2-2 (2017):
Emmanuel Macron’s Political Revolution in France

Introduction by Aline-Florence Manent, Queen Mary University of London, and Michael C. Behrent, Appalachian State University


When Emmanuel Macron beat Marine Le Pen in the French presidential election on 7 May 2017, many in Europe and North America breathed a collective sigh of relief. Macron’s victory seemed to confirm an incipient anti-populist trend that had been set earlier that year in the Netherlands and Austria. In the aftermath of the Brexit-vote and Donald Trump’s unexpected victory in the United States, Macron seemed to have stopped the populist bonfire in its tracks, turning France—rather surprisingly—into a paragon of democratic wisdom, political moderation, and optimism.

Macron’s achievement was all the more stunning in light of his rapid ascendency and his complete upending of the French political landscape. At 39, Macron became the youngest president in French history. He was completely unknown to the public until François Hollande, his predecessor, named him a member of his staff in 2012, before appointing him Economics Minister in 2014. Though Hollande, his mentor, was a socialist, Macron argued that the time had come to transcend the antiquated center-left versus center-right alternative that had structured French politics since the creation of the Fifth Republic in 1958. In the fall of 2016, Macron resigned from the government to campaign for the presidency, a quest that, to most, seemed all the more improbable as he pursued it independently of the traditional party structure, founding an entirely new movement, En Marche, as a vehicle for his centrist outlook.

Racked by internal divisions and weakened by the negative perception of Hollande’s presidency, the Socialist Party imploded and its uncharismatic presidential candidate, Benoît Hamon, led the party to its worst electoral performance in decades. As a new radical pole surfaced on the left under its self-avowed populist leader Jean-Luc Mélenchon, the traditional Gaullist party, Les Républicains, lost credibility by clinging to its scandal-ridden candidate François Fillon.

This context created a fortuitous opening for Macron’s victory. Whether or not French voters positively endorsed his politics or only reluctantly cast their ballots for Macron, they clearly rejected the anti-European, xenophobic brand of populism embodied by Marine Le Pen’s National Front. On 7th May 2017, Macron became president and his party—which had not existed a few months earlier—went onto win, in legislative elections held in June, an absolute majority in the National Assembly. No presidential election since the creation of the Fifth Republic in 1958 has transformed French politics so radically, in so little time.

A victory that seems so unprecedented raises many questions. How exactly should one understand Macron’s political identity and the type of politics he embodies? Is the new dynamic that he claims to represent as innovative as it purports to be? If Macronism is only old wine in new bottles, will this hamper Macron’s ability to lead France and Europe through the subtle revolution he laid out in his book.2 These are some of the key issues addressed in this forum.

Considering Macron’s victory from the wider perspective of the European political situation, Carlo Invernizzi Accetti claims that while Macron’s aversion to politics-as-usual and his pragmatic instincts might appear to represent a much-needed rejuvenation of an outdated political system, his charismatic style, dismissal of ideology, and emphasis on executive power are in fact characteristic of many long-term and troubling trends in European politics, notably the hollowing out of democracy as a deliberative process. Macron, consequently, is perhaps best seen as a symptom of Europe’s predicament than its long-awaited cure.

Michael Behrent asserts that Macron is simply a particularly undiluted symbol of the free-market, neoliberal politics that have substantially transformed European and global society in recent decades: Macron’s originality lies not in the policies he supports, but in the way he managed to create a broad and coherent electoral coalition to support his program.

In his contribution, Emile Chabal links Macron to the liberal tradition, but maintains that this association has less to do with his beliefs than with the electorate he needed to court in order to win: a growing constituency frustrated with excessive bureaucracy, inefficient governance, and desperate for political and economic reform. Though, from an international perspective, these ideas may seem unremarkable, they have rarely gained significant political momentum in France: in this sense, Chabal argues, Macron deserves to be seen as an original phenomenon.

Aline-Florence Manent argues that Macron bears an intellectual kinship to other liberal social democrats who defied the standard left versus right political divide. Like Raymond Aron, Manent contends, France’s new President was exasperated by the sterile antagonisms between center-left and center-right politicians – antagonisms owing more to partisan clansmanship and factitious ideological divides than to fundamentally divergent political convictions. Rejecting all forms of dogmatisms, Macron conspicuously fits the portrait that Aron once sketched of himself: “a man without a party, whose opinions offend first one side and then the other, who is all the more unbearable because he takes his moderation to excess and hides his passions under
his arguments.”

While the contributions focus on understanding the nature of Macron’s victory in May 2017, it is hoped that they will also provide some context for and insight into the unfolding political situation in France, as Macron struggles to deliver his political revolution in France.

...

https://issforum.org/ISSF/PDF/Policy-Roundtable-2-2.pdf

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Makron vraća vojni rok kao "obaveznu nacionalnu službu"


Buduća nacionalna služba u Francuskoj treba da sadrži "obavezni deo od tri do šest meseci", rekao je francuski predsednik Emanuel Makron.

On je rekao da je služba "obavezna, otvorena i za žene i za muškarce" i da može biti "otvorena u vojsci" ali da "forma može biti civilna".



Iako je Francuska 1997. ukinula vojni rok, Makron je tokom predsedničke kampanje obećao ponovno uspostavljanje "obavezne i univerzalne nacionalne službe" u trajanju od mesec dana za sve osobe rođene određene godine, što je između 600.000 i 800.000 mladih godišnje.

Trajanje službe bi mogli biti "tri meseca", ali bi moglo biti "duže ako se obavlja u civilnoj službi", naveo je Makron.

On je priznao da će služba "koštati", ali da ne misli da to znači povratak ogromnih kasarni.

Početkom februara vlada je najavila nameru da dovede izdatke na odbranu na dva odsto BDP-a do 2025. Vojni budžet za 2018. iznosi 34,2 milijarde evra.

Uspostavljanje obavezne nacionalne službe izazvalo je nezadovoljstvo vojske, zbunjenost akademskog sveta i neprijateljstvo studentskih udruženja.

Prema predlogu u koji su neki mediji imali uvid, mladi od 11 do 25 godine bi svoje "građansko putovanje" prolazili u tri koraka.

Od 11. do 16. godine bi jednu nedelju godišnje obavezno provodili u obuci za vojsku ili građanstvo, što bi bilo izvođeno u okviru škole.

Sa 16 godina bi mladi prolazili "inicijaciju" - nedelju dana u internatu tokom školskog raspusta ili sedmodnevno uključivanje u odabranu instituciju.

Najzad, period od 16. do 25. godine bi bio "priprema za obaveze" ili u civilnoj službi ili u nacionalnoj gardi.

Poslednju reč o predlog će imati radna grupa koju je odredila Jelisejska palata, a ako bude usvojen eksperimentalna faza bi mogla početi početkom 2019.

Od 11. do 16. godine bi jednu nedelju godišnje obavezno provodili u obuci za vojsku ili građanstvo, što bi bilo izvođeno u okviru škole.

Sa 16 godina bi mladi prolazili "inicijaciju" - nedelju dana u internatu tokom školskog raspusta ili sedmodnevno uključivanje u odabranu instituciju.

Najzad, period od 16. do 25. godine bi bio "priprema za obaveze" ili u civilnoj službi ili u nacionalnoj gardi.