National Council for Refoundation: Macron makes a progress report this Monday – France 24

The Head of State will chair the second plenary session of the CNR on Monday, which brings together representatives of the Macronist camp – the oppositions boycott it -, social partners, companies and associations, after the inaugural session on September 8 in Marcoussis (Essonne). The meeting, which will also be attended by the Prime Minister and members of the government, will be held from 9:30 a.m. to 5 p.m. at the Élysée Palace.

The Head of State intends to make a “progress point” of the work carried out for three months through 2,000 territorial CNRs on school, health and employment, and seven national thematic CNRs, of “Ageing well”. to housing.

Projects coming from the field will be presented, such as the “health prevention passport throughout schooling”, the creation of an eco-responsible and united store in a vocational high school and “a language laboratory to fight against inequalities from the end of kindergarten”, quotes the Elysée.

Emmanuel Macron should announce a specific envelope for identified health projects, on the model of the Educational Innovation Fund of 500 million euros initiated in September.

“These CNRs will produce decisions, concrete and rapid changes with the means provided for this”, he assured the JDD, aware that “credibility is that it leads to concrete actions”.

A “thing” decried by the opposition

The ambition of the CNR is “clear”: “to act as a Nation”, “to overcome our differences” to “rebuild our public services”, “to find the right solutions, far from postures”, insists the Head of State, determined to give substance to this new instance.

An ambition thwarted by the boycott of the oppositions and part of the unions which will again be the big absentees on Monday, where the executive wanted to believe that the “bouderie would quickly stop” in front of the first results. The CFDT, already present in Marcoussis, has however confirmed its arrival.

“The country needs less debates and reiterated observations than concrete decisions which finally respond to the urgency of the situation and the problems of the French”, asserts Annie Genevard at Les Républicains.

From the National Rally to La France Insoumise, everyone decries in chorus a “thing”, a “gadget” intended to “bypass the Parliament” where Macronie no longer has an absolute majority since June. False, retorts the Élysée: “It is neither an organization nor an institution, so there is no competition with Parliament or any authority provided for by the Constitution”.

The CNR also has difficulty capturing the attention of the French, concerned about soaring prices, the risk of power cuts and the probable increase in the retirement age.

“In the eyes of the public, it absolutely does not take”, the CNR is perceived as a “communication exercise which has the aftertaste left by the Great national debate”, notes the political scientist Bruno Cautrès, questioned by the AFP.

“Slow brew”

Launched by Emmanuel Macron in response to the Yellow Vests crisis in 2018, the Great Debate had given rise to more than 10,000 local meetings and nearly two million contributions on the internet. “We wanted to appropriate the Gaullist symbolism of the post-Second World War, but we are not after the Second World War and Emmanuel Macron is not General de Gaulle”, adds Bruno Cautrès who judges the daring desired parallel with the National Resistance Council (CNR) of 1943.

At the Élysée, we prefer to note that the elected representatives of the opposition are present in local meetings. “The CNR is not blood on the walls, it is a method of slow infusion of transformation, so necessarily it cannot be the subject of sensationalist communication”, assures a presidential adviser.

The historian Jean Garrigues, much more skeptical, sees in it “the utopia of a participatory democracy” in an “increasingly hyperindividualistic, hyperfractured society”.

“On the one hand it seems like it’s useless, and on the other those who could join have neither the time nor the motivation,” he says, wondering if all this will not ultimately “turn into a gas plant”.