Presidential elections in 2022 : never talk about it, do not even think about it…

Bruno Le Maire broke a taboo during the Europe 1 “Grand Rendez-vous” on November 19th. He mentioned a potential candidacy of Emmanuel Macron for the French presidential elections in 2022. He is the first government official to venture down that path. Even if his motivations were certainly personal (reassure the President on his own intents for instance), he still broke with a stable communication plan built carefully since Emmanuel Macron’s election.

The French President is implementing at forced march the program he was elected for. He is working on a thorough transformation of the country without ever mentioning his own future. His decision not to meet any journalist in informal meetings – contrarily to his predecessors – and to control his speeches, from their timing to the details of their contents, made it easier to comply with this new guideline.

An important part of French people seem grateful for this new behavior, if one is to believe the surveys published at his six months of presidency anniversary: a majority wants to give him time to prove himself before judging him. This trend is confirmed by a poll published in the weekly Le Journal du Dimanche which confirms that the President’s popularity keeps rising.

The media voraciously picked upon Bruno Le Maire’s little sentence, showing the dangers of such a break-up. We are back in the ancient world and the old-fashioned politics.

Not to mention that the large pedagogy efforts initiated on labour law reforms and taxation of productive capital are not over. The government will also have to convince people that the pending measures on unemployment insurance, vocational training and apprenticeship, financing of local authorities and last but not least the reform of pension system, are justified. In a nutshell: there are certainly more interesting and more urgent topics to discuss than the 2022 election. And experience shows that declaring one’s ambition of running for office may have adverse consequences. A simple glance at renunciations and drop-outs during the last two terms can illustrate it.

Today, Bruno Le Maire is expected to deliver more on his future draft law on companies’ development and transformation or on his social security tax relief expansion project, more than on his personal intentions. There is so much to be done to bring France back to a sustainable growth and to catch up with its European neighbours!