What impact will this pension crisis have on the international image of France and that of its President Emmanuel Macron in particular? This question arises with great relevance, especially since the Elysée was forced to postpone the long-awaited visit of the British King Charles III. On this occasion the question of whether the street did not dictate his diplomatic agenda to Emmanuel Macron arose a lot.
For weeks now, France has been on the front page of the international press with its demonstrations which generally end in spectacular violence, iconic images of mountains of garbage cans strewn in the streets of Paris, a city thought and perceived by the international imagination. as the most beautiful in the world, which has become an open-air living and playing ground for millions of rats.
For Emmanuel Macron, whose rigidity and inflexible governance are responsible, according to some, for this lasting crisis situation, the effect can be terrible. And French opinion was treated to a taste of what might be awaiting the French president in his upcoming international sequences.
It was during the last European summit in Brussels. While this meeting was to deal with crucial issues of the moment, be it the global banking crisis, the war between Russia and Ukraine, Franco-German differences, or what the media around the world have retained from the intervention of Emmanuel Macron, these are his attempts to explain and justify the French blockage.
If the French president fails to find a way out of this crisis, there is a good chance that its harmful effects could pursue him until he affects his diplomacy and his image in the world. And this will be all the more sensitive since Emmanuel Macron loves to strut around in international forums to shake them up with his enthusiastic convictions and passion for change.
How, ask his detractors, could he continue to play on this dynamic if it is proven by facts and images that he has led the country into an impasse and a chronic divorce between his politics and the majority of French people? This situation could diminish its credibility, pollute its image and weaken its governance.
The subject is all the more sensitive for him since he knows that the constitution forbids him a third mandate, he had thrown all his forces on international subjects hoping to imprint his mark on them and influence them by his own dynamic. However, this crisis, if it is not managed in such a way as to appease anger and frustration, could well be its Achilles’ heel, not only at the domestic level where it has a good chance of weighing down its future reformist agenda, but also on the international level where it also has a good chance of degaussing its words and its ideas to manage crises of global significance.
For Emmanuel Macron to be able to get rid of the harmful effects of this pension crisis on his national and international governance, it must quickly become part of the bad memories of the French, once a way out has been found that calms anger and calms the ardor. Otherwise, the risk of seeing the presidential speech heavily damaged in its international credibility does exist for Emmanuel Macron.
For those who defend the opposite hypothesis, namely that on the contrary, France will be taken seriously in the reformist will of its president, they will be able to invoke the European satisfaction which should normally applaud Macron’s attempts to control public spending and to respect the budgetary parameters essential to the financial equilibrium of all the countries of the European Union. They will also be able to argue that this kind of structural reform helps to make France a very attractive country for international investments which would massively boost its growth and economic prosperity.
Between the two arguments currently oscillates the image of Emmanuel Macron. That of a president who passes in force at the risk of causing chronic blockages which ruin the symbolic capital of the country. Or that of a triceps reformer who has nothing left to lose and who aspires to leave in history the mark of the only president who succeeded in reforming the pension system, a mammoth on which his predecessors all broken teeth.