MIn any case, the not yet candidate Emmanuel Macron has already said a lot about the reforms he intends to undertake during the next five-year term if, next April, the French choose to renew their confidence in him.
Spanning the presidential deadline as if it were in his eyes only a formality, the outgoing president has multiplied his speeches in recent days on the public hospital, the police, national education or even the Higher Education. If we add that states general of justice are in progress to try to develop a common diagnosis in the face of the deep ills from which the institution suffers, we have a fairly precise view of what could constitute the ordinary of a second term.
This tactic of crossing over has the gift of exasperating the opponents of Emmanuel Macron who rightly cry out for unfair competition. However, it has the virtue of raising fairly early in the presidential campaign the key subject of public services and their necessary transformation. The interminable health crisis has had the effect of revealing to the public the state of exhaustion in which a certain number of them find themselves.
The hospital, in full burn-out, is the most obvious example. One could also cite national education, where the feeling of downgrading of teachers is combined with the difficulty of the system to maintain its rank in international competition and to fight effectively against inequalities. The splitting of CP and CE1 classes into priority education zones marks both the ambition and the limits of what has been undertaken under this five-year term: the measure is both useful and visible, but it does not solve fundamentally the difficulties of managing human resources, largely linked to the heaviness of the machine.
admission of failure
In the same way, the notable loosening of the budgetary policy, authorized by the management of the health crisis, has made it possible to do a lot and yet not enough in the field of health: 19 billion euros of investment over ten years has were announced, in the summer of 2020, as part of the Ségur de la santé, and 8.2 billion euros were devoted to the upgrading of professions. However, this did not put an end to the hospital’s recruitment difficulties or its lack of attractiveness. The time for systemic reforms has come. In other words, the most complicated remains to be done.
For Emmanuel Macron, who boasted in 2017 of wanting « transformer » the country, the state of major public services, including the police and justice, sounds like an admission of failure. None of them have been profoundly transformed under his five-year term, partly because of the pandemic, partly because their real situation had been underestimated.
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