Governing Netflix style: French politics becomes a television series

French politics has become a suspense plot. In the two weeks since President Emmanuel Macron’s surprise dissolution of the National Assembly, which precipitated a call for legislative elections at the end of the month, many have felt caught in the twists and turns of a series political television. A symptom of the growing convergence between political communication and the narrative strategies of the platforms, which is not a new phenomenon, but which has been accentuated during the seven years that Macron has been in power. The disintegration in real time of the French political field would make for a fast-paced fiction, with its low blows between intimate enemies, its betrayals within each party and opportunistic alliances in each clan. Only this is reality.

To understand what happened, many invoke the codes of fiction. “A television series that has gone back and forth,” he defined. The New York Times. “A melodramatic whirlwind typical of a vaudeville,” he said. Political. “It was a Netflix-style dissolution,” says Raphaël Llorca, essayist and communication expert. “The president wanted to capitalize on the effect of shock and propose a story capable of mobilizing the entire country, within the framework of a narrative construction of reality,” he assures. The problem is that the omniscient narrator that Macron wants to embody may no longer have enough credibility to make this new story convincing.

For its part, The Figaro compared the events with The fièvre, a series that describes a France immersed in a pre-civil war climate, inspired by the theses of political scientist Jérôme Fourquet on the “archipelagoization” of the country, or a fragmentation of society into different and competing identities. Movistar+ will premiere it in Spain on July 8.

This is the new project from the creator of Baron Noir, Eric Benzekri, former advisor to Jean-Luc Mélenchon, considered an oracle for having anticipated real events in his television fictions. Benzekri had dinner with Macron at the Elysée in the middle of the 2022 presidential campaign. And two of the president’s advisors, Bruno Roger-Petit and Jonathan Guémas, supposedly responsible for this unexpected dissolution, met with the screenwriter a few months ago at the home. of him, according to Le Mondeto watch the first episode of The fièvre. It is not strange that the president introduced a nod to the series in the speech with which the electoral advance was made, alluding to “a fever that has taken over public and parliamentary debate in France in recent years, a worrying disorder.” The fièvre It has been so shocking that the Jean Jaurès Foundation, close to the Socialist Party, commissioned a 100-page report to draw political lessons from this fiction.

“Macron has brought politics to the universe of television series. The dissolution sequence has been written, scripted and brought to the screen as an episode of a series,” says essayist Christian Salmon, author of books such as Storytelling and The era of confrontation,that analyzed the influence of fiction strategies on political communication. “Macron’s advisors, trained with political series such as The West Wing of the White House either House of Cardsthey are virtuoso of the cliffhanger[final en suspenso]. The decision, which may have seemed sudden and impulsive, was made by groups of strategists similar to the scriptwriters of the writers’ rooms where the episodes of the series are prepared, and not in inter-ministerial meetings.”

“The dissolution sequence has been written, scripted and brought to the screen as an episode of a series,” says essayist Christian Salmon, author of ‘Storytelling’

Cinema and series have inspired politicians for years, but current French news points to a paradigm shift. From the idealism of President Bartlet in The West Wing of the White House to the low blows of the new French series, of the Danish and centrist paradise of Borgen to the hyperbolic plots of scandal, and from the utopianism of screenwriter Aaron Sorkin to the sensational intensity, and addictive like cocaine, of the series of his colleague Shonda Rhimes. “The communication advisors who surround the president are very influenced by television language. One of Macron’s advisors, Ismaël Emelien, was a great admirer of The west wing“, confirms Gaspard Gantzer, who was François Hollande’s communications advisor at the Elysée before allying himself with Macron in 2017 (and breaking up with him three years later). For the specialist and former politician, the rise of the president has occurred, not by chance, “in parallel to the definitive explosion of Netflix and the rest of the platforms.” “The scripting of political life has replaced ideology and long-term vision. Now there are only effects,” says Gantzer.

In France, the connecting vessels between audiovisual and political fiction are increasingly evident. Former Prime Minister Édouard Philippe, a candidate to succeed Macron, has written the script for a series for public television about… a candidate for the Elysée. The showrunner Fanny Herrero, creator of the series Call my agent, was requested for a ministry to “script political sequences.” She told them no. Macron himself starred in an imitation of a documentary series on YouTube, The candidate, which reflected the evolution of its 2022 campaign, based on one episode a day. Furthermore, the Elysée allowed several scenes of Baron Noirand The fièvre were shot inside.

In the first, reality and fiction were suspiciously confused. The slap received by Macron in 2021 during an official visit anticipated the one received, a year earlier, by the protagonist of that series, Amélie Dorendeu, a socialist politician converted into a centrist president, just like the tenant of the Elysée. In 2020, the series had described the rise of a youtuber anti-system and conspiracy. Two years later, his traits seemed to be recognized in the figure of Éric Zemmour, a former editorialist dedicated to far-right populism. At the end of the second season, Dorandeu also dissolved the National Assembly due to the threat of an Islamist attack to form a government of national unity. For his part, The fièvre reflects the climate of tension that dominates France today, imagining an identity confrontation between two blocs, one from the extreme right and the other from the extreme left, to which the worst omens point.

“Those two series are the ones that the current power has studied the most. Both demonstrate that politics is, above all, a matter of competing narratives. The best has to win,” analyzes Alexandre Gefen, researcher at the National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS). “Baron Noir reflected the end of the two-party system and the decline of the old socialism, while The fièvre “reveals a political reorganization around two extremes that have emptied the space of the center, leaving it uninhabitable.” What no one knows is the outcome of this series registered in real life, which will end on July 7 with the second round of the legislative elections, which could conclude with the victory of the RN of Marine Le Pen and Jordan Bardella. “It will end with the president’s resignation,” ventures Gantzer, who believes that his loneliness will be unsustainable after the scrutiny. Nobody promised a happy ending for all the characters.

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