Macron's focus is turning, inevitably, to the elections and Le Pen snapping at his heels. Plus increasing civil unrest - and the French aren't backwards about protesting loudly when they are unhappy, which they did in Paris and other cities on Saturday this week. One of Macron's big pre-Covid projects, which he was elected to do, was a reform of the frankly lunatic pension system here. Now, with the impacts on the economy that have come from the pandemic, there is even less appetite from the public to see this be pushed through.
Surveys here are showing that 40% or fewer French people are willing to go along with a 3rd lockdown, so the government's bag of tricks to deal with the pandemic is starting to look really empty. ATM cases aren't rising but they are still much higher than we were told was the acceptable level (20,000 a week rather than 5,000).
It feels like walking a tighrope atm. The variant anglais has not kicked off here - yet - so our numbers are steady, but high.On the one hand life feels quite normal: schools are open with very few absences, families are still mixing at home for meals, childcare, whatever (government cannot legally stop that here), shops are mostly open, many people are back to work (WFH was never popular here) there are no internal travel restrictions. But OTOH we can't travel outside France, the ski resorts are shut (and this is massive here with the winter holidays starting next week), all bars, restos etc have been shut for months, students at Uni are only just starting to get some real-life teaching, there's no clarity on exams for highs school students, and the financial / social pain is starting to hit.
Marine Le Pen has no answers (though she'd like to blame the EU, immigrants, France for the French etc). But people are so pissed off - and the government has to be the bad guys over and over again to try and deal with the pandemic. This isn't going to get them elected. And the vaccine thing I think reveals how desperate they are feeling.