A parade of guests in Matignon to get your head out of the water. Elisabeth Borne will spend the next three weeks consulting very widely to build “an action plan” with the “desire to speed up responses to the expectations of the French.” On the menu to get out of the political and social crisis, meetings with the majority itself, then with the opposition before ending with the unions.
Convince your camp
Faced with growing criticism within the macronie, Elisabeth Borne will first work to rally her own deputies. There is urgency as doubts arise internally. If the Prime Minister had tried to make “dialogue” her trademark when she arrived in Matignon last May, she failed to get pension reform done.
Heavily damaged politically by 49.3 and then by a vote of no confidence rejected by only 9 votes, the head of government must therefore recover and close ranks. Starting this Monday, he will exchange extensively with Aurore Bergé, Jean-Paul Mattei and Laurent Marcangeli, the presidents of the parliamentary groups and then the presidents of the Assembly committees before receiving Édouard Philippe and François Bayrou.
The sixty-year-old cannot do without trusted partners with a relative majority in the National Assembly and, therefore, must rebuild ties with them.
He has already set to work to smooth things over with Horizons, with whom tensions have risen in recent weeks by agreeing to a hug therapy session this Saturday during the movement’s first congress.
Resuming the dialogue with the LRs
After the majority, the President of the Government will try to re-weave the dialogue with the LR during the first week of April. Matignon failed to convince the right, seen as support force in the National Assembly, to vote for the pension reform. Worse still: 19 deputies out of 61 voted in favor of the inter-party motion of no confidence. Suffice it to say that Elisabeth Borne has a lot to do to try to calm down the discussions with the right.
The Prime Minister will propose a “legislative programme” of texts to ensure that she can build “upstream majorities”. Nothing new since it is the method used by the executive since its failure in the legislative elections. With some success: with the exception of the pension reform, all bills passed without incident.
The sixty-year-old will use these exchanges to measure the evolution of the forces on the right, part of which is fiercely anti-macronista while its leaders such as Éric Ciotti and Olivier Marleix show more roundness. “The question” of the extension of the majority to LR “does not arise”, however, the president of the movement has already pointed out in the columns of the figaro.
Resumption of dialogue with unions
Although the discussions have been broken for weeks with the unions on the pension reform, the head of government wants to “put some appeasement” in her relations with the centrals. The second week of April will be dedicated to this objective.
To do this, it says it is open to all discussion formats, evoking “bilateral meetings” or even “an inter-union meeting”. However, it is not about putting the issue of pensions back on the table while the mobilization for their withdrawal continues in the streets. Elisabeth Borne wants to put the future full employment law on the menu to advance the issue of hardship or professional recycling.
Enough to convince? Nothing is less secure. Emmanuel Macron’s interview last Wednesday in which the president accused CFDT number one Laurent Berger, without naming him, of failing to “offer a compromise” on pensions did little to dampen the pressure. The union leader’s response was immediate: “Macron is rewriting history and lying,” the unionist wrote on his Twitter account.
Will these three weeks of consultations be enough to restore Elisabeth Borne’s political credibility? It is probably the result of the protest against the pension reform that has the answer. If the movement continues and continues to harden, the fate of the Prime Minister would be very fragile. The inter-union convenes this Tuesday for a tenth day of mobilization.
Source: BFM TV
