SHARE
COPY LINK

EMMANUEL MACRON

ANALYSIS: Is Macron’s Covid strategy a ‘third way’ or just the wrong way?

The French President Emmanuel Macron has so far avoided imposing a third national lockdown in France, but with new cases soaring and intensive care units forced to expand under pressure, the strategy is coming under increasing fire from critics.

ANALYSIS: Is Macron's Covid strategy a 'third way' or just the wrong way?
Photo: Ludovic MARIN / AFP

Is it a lockdown, a loose lockdown or something different? A week after the announcement of new restrictions in Paris, many residents in the capital are unsure what to call it and the government is still adjusting its strategy.

“People are still working, taking the metro, going shopping, life’s carrying on,” 64-year-old hospital worker Lydia Moyal told AFP as she strolled near the Eiffel Tower in southwest Paris. “It’s not a lockdown.”

Walking nearby, Saida Bouani said she’d just taken a bus that was jammed full.

“I couldn’t get a seat and people sat right next to each other,” said the 58-year-old, who added that the new restrictions were “light”.

Faced with surging new coronavirus cases, Prime Minister Jean Castex announced the new measures last Thursday for around 20 million people living in Paris as well as regions in the north and south-east.

Non-essential shops would have to close in these areas, working-from-home should be increased, and everyone would need to fill out a form when they went outside.

But these weren’t “stay-at-home” orders, he said: people could take as much fresh air as they liked providing they remained within 10 kilometres (six miles) of their homes. And schools would stay open.

“We’re adopting a third way,” Castex said, saying that the strategy was built around a mantra of “containment without locking up”.

The day after, French President Emmanuel Macron took issue with the way the announcements had been reported by the media, saying “strictly speaking, the term lockdown is not right”.

Changes

The government has since abandoned the form needed to justify leaving home, which sparked ridicule when it was revealed to be two-pages long and with a choice of 15 different boxes to tick to justify an outing.

The list of “essential” shops has also grown — hairdressers as well as shops selling video games are allowed to open along with book and music stores.

The biggest change has been to the nation-wide evening curfew, which has been pushed back to 7 pm.

“It’s better now because it means you can stay out for an extra hour,” 22-year-old cinema student Clement said in the Tuileries garden near the Louvre museum, adding that he was continuing to see friends.

With the arrival of warm spring-time weather on Wednesday, groups of young people could be seen socialising in public spaces around the city, including on the lawns of the Louvre.

This prompted a reminder of the rule: no more than six people will be allowed to gather outside, the interior ministry announced late Wednesday.

The evolving measures and mixed messages have led some ministers and ruling party MPs to grumble — under the cover of anonymity — about the unclear communication from their colleagues.

French President Emmanuel Macron talks with a couple waiting to be vaccinated against Covid-19 during a visit to a vaccination center, in Valenciennes, on March 23, 2021. (Photo by Yoan VALAT / POOL / AFP)

“It’s been a very difficult week,” one told Le Monde newspaper. “There’s been some hesitation and imprecision.”

Medics and epidemiologists meanwhile are warning about the consequences. 

“I understand the strategy of wanting to do gradual measures, but with the situation we are in I’m not sure that they are going to slow down the epidemic,” Solen Kerneis, an infectious diseases specialist at Bichat hospital in northern Paris, told AFP.

“For the last week, it’s been extremely worrying. The curve is really exponential. We’re in a sharply accelerating phase of the epidemic,” she added.

Pressure

Macron is under sustained fire from opponents after taking personal responsibility for not ordering a third national lockdown at the end of January against the advice of senior scientific aides and his health minister.

Having staked so much credibility on the issue ahead of elections next year, a fresh lockdown now would be a gift to his critics who accuse him of arrogance and mismanagement.

The executive “is still looking to avoid a third lockdown”, a government source told AFP this week, defending the choice not to lock people up because of the severe mental health consequences.

The executive has made clear that it sees mass vaccinations as the only way out of the crisis — but the campaign has been stuttering since the start of the year because of a chronic lack of doses.

When Macron visited a vaccination centre in northern France on Tuesday, he again promised an acceleration.

“We as health professionals are ready, but we don’t have the doses,” a pharmacy owner, Herve Momentym, told him during his trip.

Momentym said he’d received just one batch this week, enough to vaccinate 11 people.

France has administered at least one dose to around six million people so far, around 10 percent of its population, according to data from the health ministry.

Member comments

Log in here to leave a comment.
Become a Member to leave a comment.
For members

ELECTIONS

Will Macron resign in case of a French election disaster?

The polling is not looking good for president Emmanuel Macron's party in the snap elections that he called just two weeks ago. So will he resign if it all goes wrong?

Will Macron resign in case of a French election disaster?

On Sunday, June 9th, the French president stunned Europe when he called snap parliamentary elections in France, in the wake of humiliating results for his centrist group in the European elections.

The French president has the power to dissolve parliament and call fresh elections – but this power is rarely used and in recent decades French parliaments have run on fixed terms. Very few people predicted Macron’s move.

But polling for the fresh elections (held over two rounds on June 30th and July 7th) is looking very bad for the president’s centrist Renaissance party – currently trailing third behind Marine Le Pen’s far-right Rassemblement National and the combined leftist group Nouveau Front Populaire.

Listen to the team from The Local discussing all the election latest in the new episode of the Talking France podcast. Download here or listen on the link below

The election was a gamble for Macron – but if his gamble fails will he resign?

What does the law and the constitution say?

Legally, Macron does not need to resign. In France the presidential and the parliamentary elections are separate – Macron himself was re-elected in 2022 with a five-year mandate (until May 2027).

His party failing to gain a parliamentary majority does not change that – in fact the centrists failed to gain a overall majority in the 2022 parliamentary elections too (although they remained the largest party). Since then, the government has limped on, managing to pass some legislation by using constitutional powers.

The constitution also offers no compulsion or even a suggestion that the president should resign if he fails to form a government.

In fact the current constitution (France has had five) gives a significant amount of power to the president at the expense of parliament – the president has the power to dissolve parliament (as Macron has demonstrated), to set policy on areas including defence and diplomacy and to bypass parliament entirely and force through legislation (through the tool known as Article 49.3). 

In fact there are only three reasons in the constitution that a president would finish their term of office early; resigning, dying in office or being the subject of impeachment proceedings.

Since 1958, only one president has resigned – Charles de Gaulle quit in 1969 after the failure of a referendum that he had backed. He died 18 months later, at the age of 79.  

OK, but is he likely to resign?

He says not. In an open letter to the French people published over the weekend, Macron wrote: “You can trust me to act until May 2027 as your president, protector at every moment of our republic, our values, respectful of pluralism and your choices, at your service and that of the nation.”

He insisted that the coming vote was “neither a presidential election, nor a vote of confidence in the president of the republic” but a response to “a single question: who should govern France?”

So it looks likely that Macron will stay put.

And he wouldn’t be the first French president to continue in office despite his party having failed to win a parliamentary majority – presidents François Mitterand and Jacques Chirac both served part of their term in office in a ‘cohabitation‘ – the term for when the president is forced to appoint an opposition politician as prime minister.

But should he resign?

The choice to call the snap elections was Macron’s decision, it seems he took the decision after discussing it just a few close advisers and it surprised and/or infuriated even senior people in his own party.

If the poll leads to political chaos then, many will blame Macron personally and there will be many people calling for his resignation (although that’s hardly new – Macron démission has been a regular cry from political opponents over the last seven years as he enacted policies that they didn’t like).

Regardless of the morality of dealing with the fallout of your own errors, there is also the practicality – if current polling is to be believed, none of the parties are set to achieve an overall majority and the likely result with be an extremely protracted and messy stalemate with unstable governments, fragile coalitions and caretaker prime ministers. It might make sense to have some stability at the top, even if that figure is extremely personally unpopular.

He may leave the country immediately after the result of the second round, however. Washington is hosting a NATO summit on July 9th-11th and a French president would normally attend that as a representative of a key NATO member. 

You can follow all the latest election news HERE or sign up to receive by email our bi-weekly election breakdown

SHOW COMMENTS