How To Quit Your Job And Take Everybody With You
La politique, c’est l’art de déguiser la realité
A few quotes from the orchestra seats at the latest political scandal in Paris :
‘Nicholas Hulot has in some way sabotaged Emmanuel Macron’s autumn return, which ought to have emphasized action and reform. I think we could say that Hulot has knocked Macron out,’ said Moreau-Chevrolet, a professor at Sciences Po.
‘Proof that the route of negotiation and reform is a dead end,’ Le Monde intoned in their first edito.
‘Hulot’s thunder storm,’ said the magazine l’Observateur while another wondered out loud, ‘Is this Hulot’s Last Stand ?’
‘Riveting in its tone, unprecedented in the way it was done, this action will have the effect of an electro-shock, shaking people back to life.’ Le Monde, a few days later.
Ah well, you say, never any lack of scandals in Paris. So, who is this Monsieur Hulot and what was his terrible baroud d’honneur, putting up a fight after the battle is lost ?
Nicholas Hulot was the minister the government desperately wanted to keep. He was, in the words of a someone close to the President, the finest trophy on Macron’s hunting wall. (“Le plus beau trophée au tableau de chasse de Macron.”) In fact, apart from Labor Minister Muriel Pénicaud with her penchant for doing yoga in government offices before tearing the Labor Code to pieces mindfully, he was the only minister who may be said to possess a personality at all. Macron chose them that way for a reason.
France’s most well-known and popular ecologist, Hulot is outspoken about the environmental catastrophe we just can’t bother to do anything about. After turning down offers from both Nicholas Sarkozy and François Hollande, Hulot took his chances with Macron in 2017 and became Ministre pour la Transition écologique et solidaire. He was the only minister with a popular following but then came the dog days of August with la rentrée looming and Hulot dropped the portfolio and the title. He didn’t go quietly.
Are you joking, Mr. Minister ? asked the journalist
‘He was enraged, a cold rage, but we never had the impression he was going to announce his decision. He hadn’t told his wife, he hadn’t told the prime minister, he hadn’t told the president, even his assistant didn’t know five minutes before. We experienced a moment of political truth.’ So said one of the France Inter journos who interviewed Hulot. It looks like a spontaneous decision, but the incident he recounts at the end gives you pause. I hope the translation conveys a bit of the rage simmering below the surface.
So here’s Nicholas Hulot on France Inter, early Tuesday morning, August 28th. The announcers were perhaps expecting him to talk about his summer vacation or the fall agenda…
‘I cannot comprehend why we stand around indifferently while a tragedy seen far in advance takes shape. The planet is turning into a steam bath, our natural resources are being exhausted, biodiversity is disappearing like snow in sunlight. And we persist in trying to reanimate an economic model which is the cause of all these disorders. I cannot understand how, after the Paris conference and an irrefutable diagnosis, this subject is always relegated to the last of our priorities. Contrary to everything that is said, France has done much more than many other countries. But, short-term pressures are so overwhelming for the prime minister that they preempt medium and long-term goals. In this government I’m all alone on the battlefield.
‘The prime minister, the president, have counted on my affection, steadfastness and absolute loyalty over the last fourteen months. But up to now, what do I have to show for it ? Do I have a group of people ready to descend to the street to defend bio-diversity ? Do I have a political party ? Are the powerful political factions and the opposition capable of rising above the melée so that essential things get a fair hearing? If that were the case, we’re making baby steps.
‘Have we begun to reduce the emissions which cause the greenhouse effect ? No. Have we begun to reduce the use of pesticides ? No. To check the erosion of bio-diversity ? No.
‘I’m going to take the most difficult decision of my life. I can’t lie to myself any longer. I don’t want to delude myself that my presence in government means we have risen to the challenge. So therefore I am making the decision to leave the government. Here and now.
‘It’s the saddest thing I’ve ever done. Let no one exploit it for their own ends ! Because our responsibility is shared, collective and involves all of society. I hope this distressing decision, which I kept to myself for many months, won’t be used by politicians to score points or settle scores…
‘Maybe I didn’t know how to be convincing. Maybe I didn’t know the codes, the right language. But if I left for a year, that doesn’t change anything. I made the decision last night, after debating it all summer. I hope that with things starting up again in September, drawing on the discussions that I’ve had with the prime minister and the president, the message will be clear.
‘This might seem like an anecdote, but it is one element that ended up convincing me that things are not working as they should. There was a meeting yesterday at the Elysée to discuss hunting, and I discovered the presence of an uninvited lobbyist at the meeting. It’s symptomatic of the presence of lobbyists inside the circles of power. A problem inherent to democracy. Who has the power ? Who governs ? I told Thierry Coste he had no business being there. But my decision isn’t based simply upon a disagreement over hunting reform. It’s an accumulation of disappointments. Above all because I no longer believe.
‘I don’t necessarily have the solution. I’m not a newcomer. I’ve been on the inside track. But I wasn’t successful, for example in creating a shared vision with the minister of agriculture when we had an exceptional opportunity to transform the agricultural model….
‘I hope my departure will provoke a profound introspection in our society about global realities. About the fact that Europe won’t succeed unless Africa does as well. Has the tax on financial transactions been passed, an essential first step in the effort to help Africa? Nuclear energy, that folly which serves no purpose either economically or technically, but which we just can’t give up… There are too many subjects about which I have not been not been successful in convincing anyone. I take my share of responsibility for that.’
Laughing Behind His Back
There’s plenty to comment about here but the encounter with the lobbyist was obviously the last straw for Hulot. Thierry Coste works for France’s gun manufacturers and weapons dealers and functions as special advisor to the President. Coste was close to Presidents Sarkozy and Hollande and has probably spent more time in the Palais Elysée than Nick Hulot. Hulot had warned Macron before meeting with the Minister of Agriculture, “I don’t want to see any lobbyists in there.” He went to the meeting and there Coste was. “I don’t know how this man got in,” Macron told him later. You can almost see the president shrug as he says it. Hulot must have had the feeling they were laughing at him behind his back.
The ex-Minister has lifted the roof off the Macron administration, so now citizens can see how business is transacted in the corridors. Its much-vaunted environmental agenda looks like a classic neo-liberal feint, trumpeting the small stuff while the big items (pesticides, nuclear power, etc.) are carefully side-stepped. Hulot’s replacement, a colorless piece of political furniture named François de Rugy, has already issued barely intelligible defense of nuclear power. Are environmental catastrophe and the end of life as we know it enough to shake the opposition out of its doldrums ? Is there an opposition capable of exerting pressure, a resistance, anywhere, among the so-called political parties, which are, in France like so many other parts of the world, less parties than vanity vehicles ?
Macron enjoys a stunning aggregate of goodwill in Anglo-Saxon circles for all sorts of reasons : his smart English (which he lavished on the apes of Congress to no effect), his handshake tussles with Der Trumpfo, his older wife and his environmental stand when Bonespur pulled out of the Paris accords. Is all that in ruins now ? Hardly. Bad publicity, even in the internet age, is hesitant to cross borders and yet the closer one looks at Emmanuel Macron the stranger it gets. A hard man to decode — a master of ambigüity. Like his American counterpart, the show is for conspicuous consumption only. In the days after the Hulot revelations, he rushed off to Denmark where, in what is now becoming a trademark move, he lambasted the French for being ‘resistant to reform.’ But what kind of reform is he talking about ? Attacking the unions, going after Social Security and tearing pages out of the Code du Travail are not exactly the “transformation” he promised during his campaign. Those are easy targets. The Labor Code, as we’ll see later, is an over-hyped bogeyman — unless you’re trying to stiff your workers. Everything in France runs on consultation. But not for Macron, the above-it-all Jupiterian president, who’s earned his nickname, president de les riches.
Macron has at various times called the French fainéants and illettrées, words to warm the hearts of voters next time around. Is he flaming out? If so, he’s doing it in style. He always looks perfectly composed in public — but he runs up a cosmetic bill of approximately 28,000 € every three months, so he’d better. le Macronie looks more and more like a culte, and the man an enigma. Meanwhile the savage anarchos of public opinion — that is to say, Parisians, if they bother to think about it, lean on the bar and wonder out loud if the president is gay. For once Parisians aren’t talking about sex. People have the creeping sense that everything about the man is for show.
Macron has other troubles looming on the horizon. l’Affaire Benalla is slipping out of control, with its next round of hearings in the Senate on September 19. The accused, the President’s former bodyguard who in his spare time likes to beat up protestors, has been employing very Jupiterian phrases about his upcoming face to face, calling his interrogators ‘petits monsieurs’ who have no right to question him. Newspapers and magazines are still running with Hulot’s revelations two weeks afterwards. It may not be a K.O. but it’s an impressive double cross. Macron is, for the moment, on the ropes. Will the earnest, idealistic members of his self-created party (LREM) get fed up and bolt ? They don’t have to vote with the president on everything.
Things aren’t falling apart just yet. France, said, as always, to be stuck in a rut economically (you don’t have to believe it), isn’t over yet. The new Palais Elysée tchotchke store did 350,000€ worth of business on its first weekend. There’s still money in somebody’s pants.
Here We Go Again
Dans les coulisses d’Europe (European Corridors), Medium European Press Desk, The Euro Bureau, EU Press Clippings, Deviations, Hard Knocks in the Hexagon, Monday (or Tuesday or Wednesday) Morning Headbanger… this is my first column for Medium and there’s no name for it. It’s premised on the hunch that a few readers at an English-language site might have an interest in European affaires close up. (Beats reading about the Bully day in day out.) Hulot’s live on air resignation was a good place to start because something happened, some vibration made the needles dance. Written in and out of Paris, France not Texas. Stay in touch. jg
