Does communication strategy imperfectly rhyme with political power? This could be thought after the avalanche of not always kind comments that followed the recent appearance of the President of the Republic on TF1 and France 2. For their harshest critics, the thesis can be summed up as follows: as an artifact of the hyper-presidency established by the head of state, the media “saturation” of journalists, moreover cleverly orchestrated by his collaborators, would reveal and compensate for the emptiness of his political action.
However, if there is one criticism particularly difficult to address to the resident of the Élysée, it is indeed that of not deciding and not acting. Perhaps too accustomed for too long to political leaders more inclined to management modes, to a passive adaptation of their program to the conditions dictated by the environment, to a dignity worthy of pugnacity when it doesn’t concern their career, like a “violet nestled in the moss”, the French seem to rediscover that “decision” remains the political act par excellence. A manifestation of a will that imposes itself, “it becomes power by renouncing the hesitations of knowledge” explains political scientists. In this sense, it fits perfectly within the philosophy of “rupture”, notably that of deliberation that would otherwise be endless, as regularly stated by the head of state. Asking his ministers, as Nicolas Sarkozy did publicly in front of cameras, to remain faithful to their ideas and not hesitate to express them—without, however, questioning his program—proceeds from the same spirit. Didn’t a former Prime Minister like to state to his entourage this simple observation: “in ordinary times,” he said, “Matignon makes ‘sixty strategic decisions a day’”. These commit the country’s future “well beyond a simple mandate.”
In this sense, the meticulous communication strategy devised by the presidential team neither adds nor subtracts, as they say, anything to the matter. The tools of staging could not alter the substance of the decision. “Pure action”, an action for itself, would amount to nihilism, indifferent to the contingencies of the moment, or even history. Sarkozy’s realism is situated at the exact opposite. At most, given the sensitive areas where the decision occurs, one might admit that the formal work on its presentation tends to “soften” in public opinion the supposed effects of its implementation.
But not everyone is called Nicolas Sarkozy. It is enough to observe the daily life of political life to see in the background the subsequent danger of the President’s activism: the paralysis of his entourage, somehow dispossessed of an ability to relay, beyond the visibility of the parliamentary vote alone, the Élysée’s impulse. At the risk of slowing down, or even blocking, the entire presidential dynamic.
