This Thursday, March 30, the President of the Republic Emmanuel Macron spoke in the Hautes-Alpes, in Serre-Ponçon. The initial objective of this trip was to address the current drought situation in France and to present its plan of attack to overcome it. The Serre-Ponçon lake, the place where the event took place, is obviously not a place chosen at random. Indeed, nestled between the mountains, it would be a real “sea of ​​the Southern Alps”, according to our colleagues from Liberation.
Unfortunately, it is also a blatant witness to the amplitude of the drought phenomenon experienced by the territories throughout France for many months. Thus, we can see that the shores of the lake in question have widened very significantly due to the retreat of the water.
The context in which this visit took place was tense to say the least. Barely 5 days after the events in Sainte-Soline, following which many activists found themselves hospitalized after the intervention of the police, all eyes are on Emmanuel Macron. In addition, popular protest against the pension reform is still in full swing, with a new day of interprofessional mobilization scheduled for Thursday, April 6.
Despite the questions supported on this subject, the President of the Republic said nothing about the pension reform or the postponement of the legal retirement age to 64 years. Faced with the insistence of journalists, he utters the following sentence: “But I’m not going to say the same thing every four days, otherwise we stutter. Honestly, we have to move on.”
The president therefore wishes to turn the page on this reform without further formality, even though many demonstrators made themselves heard during this visit.
A total of 200 demonstrators were present around the area marked out by the police. Not drying up whistles which, carried by the wind, most certainly reached the ears of Emmanuel Macron during his speech.
Faced with this challenge impossible to ignore, Emmanuel Macron speaks out with caution: “There is a demonstration of 200 people here, which is normal […] there are mobilizations which are within a framework provided for in our democracy.”
As for the initial subject of his visit, the President of the Republic spoke about the action plan planned to limit the devastating impact of the raging drought.
He announced it at the Salon de l’Agriculture on February 25, Emmanuel Macron is planning a “sobriety plan” on the water, some of the terms of which he shared in Serre-Ponçon. According to him, the plan in question would constitute a “gesture of confidence” towards the territories, because it is at their level that the distribution of this resource, which could not be more precious, is played out. It will consist of a set of 53 measures.
The President of the Republic also insisted on the fact that collective intelligence and a sense of effort were the key words of this initiative, and that this type of measure was crucial for future generations. According to our colleagues from Europe 1, this rhetorical twist fully joined the notion of sacrifice central to his argument for the much-maligned pension reform.