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Macron to lay out next phase of reforms as criticism mounts
PARIS, July 9, 2018 (BSS/AFP) – President Emmanuel Macron will gather both
houses of parliament at the opulent Versailles Palace on Monday for what has
become an annual address on his plans for overhauling wide swathes of French
society and institutions.
His office has given little indication of specific issues Macron will cover
during his hour-long speech, though reforms of the pension system and a plan
for tackling poverty are expected next year.
Lawmakers also begin debating Tuesday Macron’s call for constitutional
changes aimed at streamlining the legislative process, including shrinking
the number of seats in the National Assembly and the Senate by a third.
He also already pushed through corporate tax cuts and an easing of labour
laws, education and housing overhauls, and a revamp of the state rail
operator SNCF despite stiff union resistance.
But a growing number of critics, including some in his own centrist
Republic on the Move party (LREM), accuse the former investment banker of
neglecting the concerns of voters on the lower rungs of the economic ladder.
Recent comments that France spends “a crazy amount of dough” on social
security programmes did little to soften his image as the “president of the
rich”, as he is called by opponents.
Macron’s regal, top-down style has also raised hackles, with some MPs on
the both the left and right boycotting his Versailles speech as the latest
sign of a “monarchical” drift.
They cite in particular his threat to override resistance to his
parliamentary overhaul by calling a referendum “if necessary”.
He has transformed “an optional and rare presidential address into an
annual speech to which lawmakers can only respond by their absence, without
any vote,” the rightwing Republicans MP Annie Genevard said.
“Tomorrow we’re going to get a long speech on ‘my life, my work’ that will
be all about him,” Christian Jacob of the Republicans told French television
Sunday.
Macron has also taken heat over the cost of bussing out hundreds of
lawmakers to France’s former royal seat and deploying dozens of Republican
Guards who will flank his ceremonial entry — estimated at 300,000 euros
($350,000).
– Seeking balance –
The Versailles speech could be a chance for Macron to address his critics
and burnish his social justice bonafides in the face of wavering poll
numbers.
An Odoxa survey published Thursday found that just 29 percent of
respondents thought his policies “fair”, and while 75 percent declared him
“dynamic”, only 45 percent considered him “likeable”.
“The president will lay out the principles of his action for the coming
year and put them in perspective, but it’s not a speech for going into the
details of his announcements,” a source in his office told AFP.
“I hope he’s going to talk about poverty,” said Senate president Gerard
Larcher, referring to a plan which was supposed to be announced this month
but has now been pushed back to September.
Macron has vowed to slash state spending, among the highest among wealthy
countries relative to its economy, in order to balance the French budget for
the first time in over 40 years.
He has said he wants to make aid programmes more effective in terms of
getting recipients out of poverty.
Yet the president himself has given fodder to critics, after reports
emerged recently that he and his wife Brigitte had ordered a lavish new set
of porcelain tableware for the Elysee Palace costing some 500,000 euros.
“A shift is expected from policies based solely on accounting and budget
logic,” LREM lawmaker Frederic Barbier wrote in a Le Monde article on
Saturday.
“Even if we see some social advances, the balance still hasn’t been found,”
he said.
Macron is only the third French president to address lawmakers at
Versailles in recent memory, and the first to do so twice, following Francois
Hollande after the Paris terror attacks of November 2015, and Nicolas Sarkozy
in June 2009 after the global financial crisis erupted.
BSS/AFP/MSY/1034 hrs