The French president is omnipresent, despite having pledged to let his prime minister lead the campaign for the upcoming elections. Yet he has never been so unpopular, even within his own camp.
This Sunday, June 23, Emmanuel Macron was toying with a new idea, locked away almost every weekend in the Lanterne residence in Versailles. Those who had seen him recently described him as a lion in a cage. Outside the gates of the former hunting lodge, the rejection of the French president was palpable. In a bid to win re-election in the parliamentary elections on June 30 and July 7, MPs from the presidential camp no longer display his face on their campaign posters. “People hate you,” former Renaissance MP Patrick Vignal told him on June 11, when the president called him to find out how his decision, taken two days earlier, to dissolve the Assemblée Nationale, was perceived on the ground. “Emmanuel Macron is like an artist who has gone out of fashion,” said the elected official. Vignal believed the fall from grace was excessive, even if, like most MPs, the former Socialist himself did not understand the president’s action.
Macron knows he’s misunderstood. On June 21, he recorded a podcast for an entrepreneurs’ website, “Génération Do it Yourself,” defending the rationality of his action for an hour and 45 minutes. The president castigated the political programs of his opponents, “the extremes,” as he labeled them, targeting both the far-right Rassemblement National (RN), on the brink of power, and the left-wing alliance Nouveau Front Populaire (NFP). In his eyes, they will lead “to civil war.” A strong phrase, perhaps too strong? “No comment,” sighed someone at Macron’s Renaissance party campaign HQ, where the president’s public appearances are deemed to be increasingly clumsy.
Macron had pledged to let his prime minister, Gabriel Attal, lead the legislative campaign. But, since June 9, the president has been speaking out every other day. “He’s a man who never loses hope of trying to convince people,” said an Elysée spokesperson. Last Sunday, he wanted to make his voice heard again. But how? According to the Elysée, in a phone conversation with the majority leaders, Macron had been contemplating the idea of writing a “Letter to the French.”
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