Gauche handling of France’s Gauche contrasts with New Zealand premier’s adroit Coup Politique
When Jacinda Ardern shut in the support of her Labour-led coalition government’s ideological left wing support she did so quickly, effortlessly, decisively and effectively.
When Francis’ president Emmanuel Macron tried to the same thing with his eco-ideologues he ignited a carboniferous subterranean smouldering fire akin to those that plague the sites of abandoned mine workings.
The New Zealand Labour government swiftly bonded in its liberal political and media class wing at the outset of its administration with the proclamation of its ban on oil and gas prospecting.
It knew that this bold appeal to high-minded university campus grade purity of thought was going to weld into the Labour-led coalition the climatist movement.
The bold decisiveness of the Labour’s handling of this lock-in contrasts with that of French president Emmanuel Macron.
He was presented at the outset of his presidency with much the same problem in handling the liberal political class base which was responsible for putting him into the Elysees Palace.
In contrast he mishandled the same problem.
The result of this fumbling is there for all to see in, for example, the Gilets Jaunes displays.
These routine and scheduled riots are the result of president Macron’s gauche handling of his own gauche in seeking to apply his own dithering solution to the same problem, that of disarming the fashionable, activist left.
The problem of locking in its media and political class ideological support base was solved by New Zealand’s Labour – led coalition in a military manner that incorporated stealth, deception and surprise to achieve a fait accompli.
The stealth was that discussion about it was limited and restricted and thus there were no leaks.
The surprise was that the oil industry believed that an exploration cloture would be the subject of a fairly prolonged “conversation.”
The deception was that instead of being announced at some environmental summit the scheme was announced to a student gathering.
The decisive delivery was to deliver the anti prospecting proclamation without any warning so early in its term and before the lobbies had the time to do anything about it.
Confronted by this same problem and the same opportunity president Macron in contrast allowed his strategy to become attenuated, drift out of his own hands and thus missed the decisive symbolic moment so deftly exploited by his New Zealand counterpart.
His poor delegation of the problem allowed it fester which had the effect of the accelerating agitation of this noisy ideological base which in France hits in addition to the television studios, the streets for additional theatre value.
President Macron belatedly sought to please this base with its shared and unifying belief in man made global warming and did so with a series of appeasing and symbolic taxation reshuffles.
These were viewed by France’s always restive blue collar, productive, classes as an attempt by president Macron to appease his elitist class support base and do so at the expense of the working classes, this in a nation ultra sensitive to its elites profiting at the expense of the non-privileged.
President Macron‘s decision to increase fuel taxes was viewed as placating the privileged at the expense of the workers
Another move to cater for this elite class was to symbolically reduce France’s speed limit for the benefit of the climatists.
The Gilets Jaunes followed, seemingly unstoppable.
The New Zealand Labour-led coalition’s blunt proclamation sans any trade-offs serves as a standard in the management of the political class and its expectations.
Mr Macron remains mired in his environmental morass in spite of concession after concession.
Current conversations pointedly focus on eliminating the select few universities, notably ENA, that nurture the political class elites that president Macron had so ardently tried to court.
Should France’s Ecole National d’Administration survive the current purge, then a suitable case for study in one of its new classless classes might be the virtuous self-flagellating groupthink in two nations that led the way in renewable energy.
New Zealand did so in hydro electric power, and France with nuclear energy.
