C in the air – Strikes, business, electricity… It gets complicated! streaming – Replay France 5

While Emmanuel Macron, visiting the United States this week, attacked the plan to fight inflation passed by the American president, considered protectionist, and warned against the risk of “fragmenting the West”, in France the rise in prices and the energy crisis are causing concern but also social tensions.

Since the fall, wage demands have been heard in many companies to offset inflation, and this month of December promises to be turbulent on the social front. Thus after a first mobilization, the employees of the RATP no longer exclude an indefinite strike in December if their new boss, Jean Castex, does not meet their expectations. At the SNCF, as the annual wage negotiations are opening, a first movement by the controllers forces the railway company to cancel 60% of its TGV and Intercités from Friday to Sunday, and other strikes are already planned between now and end of the year, including Christmas. And this anger is also expressed in the health sector where general practitioners and liberal biologists have decided to close practices and laboratories this Thursday and Friday, some to demand price increases, others to avoid a “plane blow” .

In this particularly tense social climate, and as the cold sets in in France, the government is beginning to prepare businesses and residents for power cuts that could occur in the country, given the lack of nuclear production. With online for the moment, the month of January which – according to the operator of the electricity transmission network RTE – presents a “high” risk of tension, even in the event of a “moderate cold wave”.

But the executive is entangled in business and in the controversy over the use of consulting firms, especially since the opening of two judicial inquiries targeting the president’s 2017 and 2022 election campaigns. The first is open to the heads of “non-compliant keeping of campaign accounts” and “minoration of accounting elements in a campaign context”. Justice suspects employees of the McKinsey consulting firm of having worked voluntarily for Emmanuel Macron’s campaign in 2017. The second judicial investigation concerns facts of “favoritism”. Namely the counterpart of the volunteer work carried out by the McKinsey teams. Since then, the debate on the use of consulting firms in ministries has been revived. If Bruno Le Maire acknowledged that there were “abuses”, Olivier Véran assured that he did not know “what is a drift or an abuse”. For his part, the head of state had estimated last Friday that he was not at the heart of the investigation by the National Financial Prosecutor’s Office and had deemed it “normal” for justice to do its job.

Subsequently, the President of the Republic went to the United States to visit Joe Biden, but the news continued to buzz with his disputes with the National Financial Prosecutor’s Office (PNF), as well as those of his secretary. general at the Élysée Alexis Kohler, indicted last September for “illegal taking of interests” or the resignation of his Minister of Territorial Communities, Caroline Cayeux, after the HATVP took legal action for suspicions “of ‘false evaluation’ of his declaration of assets and of ‘tax fraud’.

On the side of the Republicans who are preparing to elect a new president, it is the Gaël Perdriau affair that is shaking the party. If he is no longer a member of LR, he is still mayor of Saint-Étienne. Eric Ciotti, Bruno Retailleau and Aurélien Pradié, the three candidates for the head of LR, called yesterday for his resignation after a last episode revealed by Médiapart.