36 Time September 30, 2019
standpoint,” says Ismaël Emelien, a longtime adviser
of Macron’s who left the Élysée in February. “He
always knew that since we were transforming the
country, it would come with some costs.”
The President attributes his early mistakes to
being in too much of a rush to make changes, storm-
ing ahead with little awareness of the negative im-
pact. “I probably provided the feeling that I wanted
to reform even against people. And sometimes my
impatience was felt as an impatience [with] the
French people. That is not the case.” Instead, he says,
he is impatient with the system itself. “Now, I think I
need to take more time to explain where we are and
what we want to do exactly.”
At the halfway point in a five-year term, Macron
plows ahead with Part 2 of what he
calls his “revolution.” At home, he is
taking on the labor unions to reform
the country’s hugely costly state pen-
sions. And on foreign policy, he is
playing peacemaker; he is trying to
bring together leaders from Russia,
Ukraine and Germany to solve the
war on Ukraine’s eastern border and
urging President Donald Trump to
meet face to face with Iran’s Hassan
Rouhani. He remains convinced of
who he should be as President. But at
the same time, he says, the experience
of his presidency so far has left him
feeling alone and exposed. He says
he is in the “Death Valley” between
setting out reforms and seeing them
bear fruit. “The end of Death Valley
is the day you have results.”
On the Other side of that valley is
a transformed country, Macron says.
“Building this new France is my ob-
session.” Yet it is in that pursuit that
his greatest problems lie.
Certainly, some things have gotten better since
Macron came to power. France’s unemployment
rate of 8.5% is now the lowest in more than a decade,
down from 9.5% when he took power, according to
E.U. statistics. Foreign direct investment in France
last year was the highest in over a decade, and growth
in 2019 is expected to be a steady 1.3%.
Yet France’s public debt has ballooned to nearly
100% of GDP, in part because more than 5 million
people still work in its bloated civil service—and be-
cause of the billions Macron spent assuaging the Yel-
low Vests. So Macron began his rentrée—what the
French call the period following the languid summer
break—by pushing for an overhaul of one of France’s
most cherished institutions: the state-funded pen-
sions that consume 14% of public spending. First on
the chopping block were the special privileges for
World
dozens of professions carved out by labor unions
over decades.
Unions reacted precisely as they have dozens of
times before when confronted with reform- minded
politicians: they put down their tools. Paris and other
cities virtually ground to a halt on Sept. 13, as public
transportation workers went on strike. On Sept. 16,
nurses, doctors and even lawyers marched in protest.
Facing the prospect of drawn-out labor action,
Macron insists he will make changes through con-
sultation. To those in favor of reforms, that sounds
too cautious. “Little by little he is becoming poli-
tics as usual,” says Daniela Ordonez, chief French
economist at the global forecasting company Ox-
ford Economics. “He has this freedom to do what-
ever he wanted.”
But to others, especially on the
left, he is trying to create a gig econ-
omy in which people fend for them-
selves. Many French fear losing cher-
ished benefits they have preserved
for generations. “To be clear,” the
left-wing French economist Thomas
Piketty wrote in Le Monde newspa-
per on Sept. 10, echoing the opinion
of Macron’s detractors, “the present
government has a big problem with
the very concept of social justice.”
When Macron talks of creating a
green economy with innovation at its
core, it can sound as if he is describ-
ing a startup rather than a country.
“This is a necessity: to build this new
country, this new France of the 21st
century,” he says.
But the old France, in which mil-
lions of people depend on the sup-
port of a high-spending government,
is still very much in evidence. That
was clear the day after TIME’s inter-
view with Macron, when we accompanied him to
Bonneuil- sur-Marne, a middle-class town 10 miles
southwest of the city. Under a program in partner-
ship with the government, companies there have
hired about 120 people who have been unemployed
long term, offering them training and drawing them
into the regular workforce.
For more than an hour, Macron inched his way
through a factory, engaging in long discussions with
each worker about their lives. “How did you come to
France?” he asked the mostly new immigrants, who
packed sneakers for the French company Veja and
dismantled used electronics for recycling. Finally, he
took up a chair in the warehouse, which had been
turned into a meeting hall for the afternoon, and held
court for several hours. About 200 local officials and
workers passed around the microphone, alternately
complaining about government bureaucracyMacron has
repeatedly tried
in vain to have
Trump reverse
his isolationist
decisions, including
withdrawing the
U.S. from the nuclear
deal between Iran
and the major world
powers