标题: 2022.03.03 马克龙的魅力攻势 [打印本页] 作者: shiyi18 时间: 2022-3-4 05:46 标题: 2022.03.03 马克龙的魅力攻势 FRENCH ELECTION
Emmanuel Macron’s charm offensive
France’s president is respected but unloved
Mar 3rd 2022
BY SOPHIE PEDDER
The president of France is squashed hip to hip with local officials on a low sofa upholstered in a Moroccan-style motif. Before him, on a small table, is a platter of pâtisseries. The airless room is filled with riotous chatter. A woman fans herself in the corner. “Shhhhh! A bit of quiet!” calls an organiser. “Let him speak!” The buzz doesn’t stop.
Emmanuel Macron has come to a housing estate in the crime-troubled northern suburbs of Marseille to speak to community workers. “Merci beaucoup, merci,” he begins, edging forward on his cushion. But the brouhaha continues. An appeal goes out again: “Shhhh, allez, let the president speak!”
For a few boisterous moments, presidential protocol is suspended. Vertical authority, the organising principle of the Fifth Republic, collapses, and a president who officiates in a palace is just another visitor to a run-down community centre. “Our young people are suffering,” a mother tells him, “teachers aren’t replaced, there’s a lack of infrastructure, no heating in the winter.”
The president listens to the litany of grievances for over an hour. Or perhaps he is rehearsing in his head the speech he will give later that day to local policemen. His focus betrays no distraction: not once does his gaze slip to his phone or watch. Meanwhile, local residents bombard him. “There’s no point coming here with a plan drawn up in an aeroplane,” Amine Kessaci, a lycée pupil, says to the president. The school student set up a local youth group after his brother, Brahim, was shot dead in 2020 in a turf war between gangs. “We really want to be respected,” he says. “We want a voice. We want to be told: we won’t treat you as illiterate, as second-rate citizens.”
“How old are you?” asks Macron quietly.
“Seventeen.”
The women clap. The president nods, in silence.
For three days last September I followed Macron on his trip to Marseille, the longest visit he had made as president to any city. In picking the Mediterranean port – known for poverty, crime and among the highest murder rates in France – he seemed to be on a defiant charm offensive in hostile territory. Macron had not yet formally declared his intention to run for a second term as president in this April’s election. Nor was it clear who his chief opponents would be. But as the trip unfolded it felt like the informal launch of a presidential campaign.
The tower blocks were scrubbed clean in advance of Macron’s arrival and the stops packed in as if running through the points in a manifesto: a primary school, a hospital, a police station, a community centre. There was Europe, in the shape of a four-hour tête-à-tête with Mario Draghi, the Italian prime minister, at Le Petit Nice, a three-Michelin-star restaurant on the seafront. And there was saving the planet too, with a Mediterranean outing on an overcast morning to the protected reserve of les Calanques, aboard a lurching boat belonging to an environmental ngo.
Macron came from nowhere, belongs to no party system and defies ideological labels
In 2017 Macron stunned the nation when, aged 39, he seized the highest office, crushing France’s post-war parties only a year after setting up his own, now called La République En Marche. His term has been turbulent by any standards, buffeted both by external forces – the pandemic and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine among others – as well as domestic turmoil in the form of terror attacks, the longest French strike since May 1968 and the gilets jaunes (yellow jackets) protests. When he was elected, Macron’s appeal was partly about the freshness of his personality, untainted by decades of political hackery, and the challenge he presented to the old order. How has power changed the young pretender?
Like any president of the highly centralised Fifth Republic, for nearly five years Macron has been the obsessive focus of national debate on the airwaves, streets and in the salons of France. Yet even today he remains a mystery: a leader who came from nowhere, belongs to no party system, defies ideological labels and is strangely rootless. Though he campaigned in 2017 as an outsider, in office his breezy self-assurance and aloof manner have made him hard to warm to – or for others to feel that he relates to them. Even when he appears to do so, as Amine Kessaci told me after their conversation in the cramped Marseille community hall, the encounter often leaves his audience confused.
With the next presidential election just weeks away, that disconnect matters more than ever. The haughty, over-educated technocrat is a product of the country’s elite institutions. His iron-clad self-belief borders on arrogance and his detachment from ordinary people verges on indifference. In a poll, 61% think he is “authoritarian” and only 26% “close to people’s concerns”. Five years ago Macron defeated the populist right and held the liberal centre, promising a new era of post-partisan politics. On his watch, France has become more entrepreneurial, business-friendly, assertively European, greener and in some ways more open. But it is also more polarised, a society that frets over not only its detached elite but also its national identity, the impact of immigration and the place of Islam in a secular republic.
Two forceful populist candidates on the hard right, Marine Le Pen and Eric Zemmour, are eyeing the presidency – and it is they who are largely framing the debate around identity politics. Even the centre-right nominee, Valérie Pécresse, is nodding in their direction on cultural values. No president has won a second term in France for 20 years. Macron may manage this feat – but even if he wins at the polls, the populists’ outsized influence on the national conversation, combined with Macron’s lack of a popular touch, means he may yet lose control of the mood. At some level, he knows this. Before heading to Marseille he spoke of a “possible reinvention” of the city. As we leave the meeting at the housing estate, I begin to wonder whether the president was really talking about himself.
Marseille is unlike any other city in France: facing the Mediterranean, it is a crossroads of cultures and tongues, an often paradoxical assemblage of kebab joints and haute cuisine, modern art and gang warfare, crushed between sea and mountain and washed through with blanched light. Over the decades, Algerians, Moroccans, Tunisians and former French settlers from north Africa stepped off the boat there and made it their home. Today, over a quarter of the population is thought to be Muslim. The French call it populaire, a working town, which worships football, defies rules and distrusts Paris. Parisians, in turn, tend to deride the Marseillais.
Aides and diplomats live with last-minute presidential policy decisions and rewrites
Louis XlV built two forts at the entrance to the port in the 1660s to keep an eye on the rebellious city. Today, Marseille is run by Socialists but sits at the heart of a historically right-wing region, where voters tend to be older and more opposed to immigration than the average. It is the only one in mainland France that, at the election in 2017, did not put Macron ahead of both the centre-right (François Fillon) and hard-right (Le Pen).
The region represents both a warning and a challenge to the president, and a brave launch-pad for a seduction campaign. It is a reminder of the powerful social dynamics at work in France – the stirring of anxiety, hate and conspiracy, the deep strain of reactionary nationalism – which threaten to outpace Macron if he cannot persuade people that he understands them.
On day one of the presidential visit, under a cobalt sky, Benoît Payan, the young Socialist mayor of Marseille, welcomes the president with a double fist bump as his motorcade pulls up to the 17th-century quayside mairie. In the harbour behind them, rows of small painted wooden fishing boats are moored to a pontoon. Late-season tourists queue to take the ferry boat, immortalised in Marcel Pagnol’s 1930s film “Marius”.
Macron’s visit bestows prestige, and shines a softer light on a city that more often grabs headlines for drug-running, gang warfare and strikes. The town hall is abuzz with talk about a long-awaited speech the president is to make the following day. After years of mismanagement, hopes are high that the central government is finally going to put money into the city to help fix schools and beat crime. But the new mayor doesn’t know anything about the contents of Macron’s speech. “I haven’t the faintest idea what he’s going to announce,” says Payan. “That may seem bizarre to you, it’s even more bizarre for me.”
The next evening, after a day spent visiting a primary school and then a covid ward at the main public hospital, the president unveiled his plans. He is standing across the water from the town hall in the gardens of the Palais du Pharo, which was built on a rocky outcrop by Napoleon III for his wife, Empress Eugénie. With the sublime sun-lit backdrop of the city and the Provençal hills behind him, the setting begged for something majestic: the conjuring of history, conquest, maritime trade, exile, lives lost and remade. Instead, primary-school children fidgeted in their seats in the garden as the president waded through a thicket of acronyms. “You have a problem with your municipal employees, and you have too many strikes,” the president scolded the city bigwigs whom he had, in principle, come to charm.
The speech came across as didactic and distant – the French have become used to both from this president. Beholden to no established political party, Macron runs the presidency, just as he managed the campaign. “He is solitary, he decides everything alone, by himself,” says Gérard Araud, Macron’s ambassador to Washington, dc, until 2019.
At the centre of this system is control – of policy, diplomacy, appointments, announcements. Such a machine can be efficient, particularly when implementing manifesto pledges that other presidents have found hard to impose: loosening the labour market, ending pension privileges for railway workers, cutting taxes, encouraging investment in everything from tech start-ups to early education. During the pandemic, alone and often against counsel, Macron took repeated risks. He re-opened schools two months in, and he introduced a covid pass despite being told it would prompt an anti-vax rebellion. France’s vaccination rate promptly rose above that of Germany and Britain.
Yet this hyper-centralised presidency can be a source of persistent frustration for aides and diplomats who live with last-minute presidential policy decisions and rewrites. Pascal Lamy, former head of the World Trade Organisation and close to Macron, who joined him on the boat in Marseille, notes that the president tore up a whole chunk of his speech to an environmental summit in the city after listening at sea to scientists explain the perils of microplastics and other threats to ocean biodiversity. “When people don’t do things exactly the way he wants, he ends up grumbling that he might as well do everything himself,” says one of his deputies. The president’s in-tray often piles up with matters awaiting his personal decision. He has also ruthlessly discarded those who are no longer useful to him. “Emmanuel knows how to get from each person whatever can be of service to him,” his father, a neurologist, once told Le Monde.
François Hollande earned the nickname “Flanby” after a caramel pudding
The urge to control extends even to his relationship to time: Macron likes to say grandly that he is “master of the clocks”, able to dictate the pace, to brake or accelerate as he sees fit. He certainly packs more into a day than most. Three days before arriving in Marseille he was in Iraq. Once, on the presidential plane on the way back from a short trip to China, I watched as aides took turns to go in and out of the presidential aircraft office for debriefs and planning meetings non-stop during the nine-hour flight. He didn’t once stop for a break.
Macron likes to depict himself as being somehow misaligned, or “desynchronised” with his own generation, as he once put it. Emmanuel Jean-Michel Frédéric Macron was born into a family of medics in the provincial town of Amiens in the flat agricultural plains of the Somme battlefields, on December 21st 1977. It was the year that Concorde took to the skies and the Centre Pompidou reinvented modernist architecture. The young Macron spent his spare time buried in books picked out for him by his grandmother, Germaine Noguès (known as Manette), a retired primary-school head whose apartment was round the corner from Macron’s family home.
He was clever, but flouted convention. As a teenager, Macron fell in love with his married drama teacher, Brigitte Auzière (née Trogneux), 24 years his senior. The Amiens bourgeoisie was so scandalised by this liaison that Macron was sent to Paris to finish his schooling. But he was not deterred from his prize: he married Brigitte, now the first lady, and took his first steps up the ladder, via the prestigious École Nationale d’Administration (ena), that ultimately took him to the heart of the French elite.
It wasn’t just in his personal life that Macron was precocious. He passed his baccalauréat at the age of 17, earned a master’s degree in philosophy while simultaneously studying at Sciences Po for ena, became a managing partner of Rothschild bank when he was 32, and president of France on his first attempt at winning electoral office.
At ease in the company of his elders, the “desynchronised” Macron may not have thought of himself as young, but he knew that others did. Just two months after his inauguration, the new president fired General Pierre de Villiers, chief of the defence staff, for criticising his defence cuts. He needed to show who was in charge, Macron told me at the time. He also needed to demonstrate his power: “Here was this young man, with little experience, who needed to make himself respected and assert his authority,” recalls Pierre Haski, a veteran French reporter. “The confluence of his personality, and the institutions of the Fifth Republic, created Jupiter.”
After five years it is easy to forget that Macron devised the Jupiterian presidency as a counterpoint to the “normal” presidency embodied by his Socialist predecessor, François Hollande, who earned the nickname “Flanby” after a brand of caramel pudding. Hollande, in turn, had intended to curb presidential showmanship after the “bling” presidency of Nicolas Sarkozy – instead, Hollande’s reign ended in mediocrity, dithering and stagnation. As Hollande’s minister, Macron concluded that the French yearned for a complete break – not just for a more competent government, but for quasi-monarchical rule.
When Macron stands up at the end of a meeting, he reaches down carefully to smooth his narrow trousersWhen Macron stands up at the end of a meeting, he reaches down carefully to smooth his narrow trousers
Jupiter was born: an elevated figure – king of the gods – who would restore dignity through distance and respect through authority. Five years on, the reason residents on a housing estate in a run-down suburb of Marseille are so surprised by the approachable president they meet is that even today Macron’s iconography revolves around majesty and grandeur.
From the beginning, the amateur thespian embraced the classical theatre of the presidency, stepping with staged solemnity in the dark on election night across the courtyard of the Louvre to seize the presidency, later choreographing a knuckle-crunching handshake with Donald Trump. “He’s permanently performing,” says Haski. “You can see it in the way he looks around to see who’s watching, all the time.” Macron’s style is the anti-Boris Johnson. The British prime minister strides about, his suit ill-fitting and tie flapping, as if to mock formality and render amateurism sympathetic. When Macron stands up at the end of a meeting, he reaches down carefully to smooth out his narrow trousers.
The well-cut, crease-free suit, usually navy blue, is his uniform: he wears it to sea in Marseille, in the sand in the Sahel or in the sodden fields of la France profonde. “We told him loads of times, listen, you are heading to the Cantal, there’s mud, put some boots on,” recalls Sylvain Fort, who wrote speeches for him from 2017 to 2019. “What happens? No boots. His shoes finish the day completely destroyed.”
The French word for suit is costume, and this is his: a daily reminder that Macron is not like his people, and that embodying this difference seems to matter to this president. In his uniform, Macron exudes control and classical form, a mastery of both outfit and office.
On occasion, he drops the suit jacket, as he did in the Marseille community centre; even more rarely he slips on a roll-neck. But in the entire time I have reported on him over the past decade, I have only once talked to him when he was dressed informally – on a long-haul flight on the presidential plane, when he wore a zip-up hoodie and jeans while working on his dossiers. It was momentarily unsettling. Was he still the president without the suit? Did he turn back into a regular 40-something? But this is not the Macron that he puts on public display. For the French, the suit is the president: formal, apart, different, superior and alone.
You can’t believe anything he says, he manipulates everyone, he sets off demos all by himself!” A young man, Karim, is pacing the pavement near Marseille’s town hall, shouting out a catalogue of complaints, among them that Macron is “forcing us to get vaccinated”. He and a few dozen other locals have gathered to protest; the president’s imminent arrival is all over the morning news.
Police have set up a precautionary barricade to keep people at a distance – demonstrators have draped a homemade white-sheet banner over it: “Macron’s response to gilets jaunes: 2,500 wounded, 26 blinded”, a reference to police violence three years ago when protesters railed against a rise in the carbon tax on motor fuel. For most people in Marseille the presidential visit is merely an inconvenience: roads are briefly cordoned off; armed policemen stand guard on street corners, while residents in high-rise blocks look down from balconies adorned with drying laundry. But Macron’s trip runs into a number of such micro-protests as it unfolds.
The rough northern suburbs of Marseille, with their brutalist tower blocks and informal pavement markets where hawkers offload second-hand clothes, are not a natural habitat for a former investment banker who abolished the wealth tax. This is the president who once spoke of railway stations as a place where you come across “people who are nothing”, who seems more at ease holding forth under palace chandeliers, trying (in vain) to sweet-talk Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin into better behaviour, or supplying Britain with a ready-made villain for its Brexit woes.
Few recall that he is also a president who halved the size of many primary-school classes in poor areas and introduced free school breakfasts. Instead, Macron has been the target of peculiarly raw violence: during the gilets jaunes crisis, the president’s effigy was hung from nooses on roundabouts. It was the revenge – in high-vis jackets – of the “people who are nothing” against a ruler they saw as intolerably arrogant and out of touch. The image lingers. In June last year, a member of the public reached out to slap him on the face.
Yet as the president moves about Marseille, citizens who talk to the president in person often seem surprised by the person they encounter. The lycée pupil who had moved Macron at the housing estate, Amine Kessaci, told me he’d expected someone more intimidating: “But he was very attentive, very accessible. He really listened. We’ll see if he keeps his promises. But honestly that surprised me.”
The more I watch a gap open up between the president’s icy reputation and his manner in person, the more I begin to wonder whether Macron has set himself a trap. During his election campaign in 2017 he knocked on doors (for which he was mocked) and headed off on a “great march” around the country to ask what people wanted from the government. He staged low-cost events in municipal halls to which he travelled by train, second class. At rallies, the candidate hushed crowds that booed at the name of his opponents, and promised bienveillance (kindness). En Marche, as his party was then called, was built around grassroots networks, though it ultimately became a slick enterprise – run by himself, for himself. He put contact above any security concerns, once famously ignoring advice and wading into a hostile crowd of unionists who were burning tyres outside a washing-machine factory in his home town of Amiens.
French history marks progress through revolt: its rulers disregard the people at their peril
There are moments in Marseille when Macron seems to reconnect with that spirit. Emerging from his black presidential car at a housing estate he scans the scene swiftly, eyeing the young men in baseball caps perched on a wall, then climbs up to bump fists with them and listen to their complaints. Further along, on the concrete forecourt, an older woman in a black headscarf begs him: “We want to leave this place.” She grasps the president’s hand, and he holds it with both of his for a long moment.
At the beginning of his presidency, Macron tried to prove the naysayers wrong by showing that a young man with little political experience could be an authoritative, powerful leader. But the obverse of that figure – the distant elitist – has become hard to shift. With hindsight, says his former speechwriter Sylvain Fort, “the change of register after Hollande was probably too brutal, too doctrinal. He perhaps asserted it a bit too strongly.”
Macron has struggled to show empathy in public – something noticed by Marine Le Pen, of all people. “He has this ability to make his interlocutors feel he is listening to them, that he’s attentive to their point of view,” she told two French authors. “He’s capable of doing this in private. But he doesn’t manage it when he speaks to the nation. It’s quite surprising.”
Others put it more bluntly, calling him cold, curt, lacking in humanity. This was particularly evident during the early phase of the pandemic. When the president put the country into lockdown for the first time, he visited a mobile army hospital in eastern France, struck a martial note and evoked war. Only later did he begin to express concern for the psychological strain of solitude.
Of course, the regal trappings of the French presidency sit awkwardly with the common touch: the head of state governs from a palace, officiates as co-prince of Andorra, enjoys baguettes delivered by the boulanger crowned the best in Paris each year and gives televised speeches introduced by trumpets playing “La Marseillaise”.
“The great paradox”, says Fort, “is that the French want a president who speaks well, holds himself well, knows how to bow to the queen and has a literary culture. But at the same time they want a guy who knows how to barbecue in his garden.” Others have managed that delicate balance far better. Charles de Gaulle had hauteur but paid his own electricity bills at the Elysée palace. Jacques Chirac was known for his fondness for saucisson and bottled beer. Valéry Giscard d’Estaing, with his aristocratic airs, conspicuously failed – and then also failed in his bid for re-election.
Western democracies the world over are now bearing witness to the destructive social forces unleashed by politicians without parties or elites without empathy. These are hard to contain. French history marks progress through revolt: 1789, 1870, 1968. Its rulers disregard the people at their peril. A recent poll asked citizens what bothered them most about Macron. The most common answer? “His disconnect from the realities of daily life.”
In an age of ruthless populism, turbo-charged by social media, distance amplifies charges of elitism and legitimises a populist framing of the debate. Neither Le Pen nor Zemmour has to win the election to drag the national debate onto treacherous ground. The promise Macron made in 2017, to bring people together rather than feed hate and demagoguery, could prove empty even if he wins.
What bothered citizens most about Macron? “His disconnect from the realities of daily life”
A few months into his presidency, sitting beneath chandeliers at the Elysée, surrounded by butlers, bodyguards and high palace walls, I asked Macron if he worried about being cut off. This risk was precisely why he tried to get out, he replied, to spend nights in different parts of France, when possible, to wander around late at night, escape the bulle (bubble) and get a sense of what people really feel. Yet the gilets jaunes crisis was a cruel lesson: understanding a risk is not always enough to protect you from it.
That social crisis was, in retrospect, a defining moment: the uprising of the people against Jupiter. The hate unleashed by the mobs that ransacked Paris was red-hot and aimed directly at him. When Macron went to inspect the damage after protesters torched the préfecture in Puy-en-Velay in the Massif Central, a mob charged through the streets chasing the presidential convoy, shouting at Macron to resign. An image taken through the car’s half-open window captured the president’s eyes, staring back at the scene of raw violence, with a mix of disbelief, hurt, defiance and solitude. “I doubtless let appear something that I profoundly don’t think I am, but that people began to detest,” Macron told a television interviewer some time later, conceding: “No doubt, I’ve made mistakes.”
He was clearly shaken. But, as is his wont, he also intellectualised such events. When I asked Macron once how he had felt about the gilets jaunes, he detached the personal from the historical with clinical calm, attributing the attacks to the return of violence and the periodic uprisings that characterise French society.
As the violence raged on, Macron cleared his diary and organised town-hall meetings across the country to show that he could, at least, listen. Astonished audiences found the president sitting for hours on a plastic chair in municipal halls, taking notes about local bus services or the threat to sheep farmers from mountain wolves. They hate my face, he seemed to say, well, they are going to see a lot more of it now.
De Gaulle liked to say that reaction to the forces of “circumstances” measured the character of men. The gilets jaunes crisis and the pandemic have served as a double test. Yet nothing in the president’s demeanour suggests that his appetite for personal risk has diminished. Since 2015, 245 people have been killed in France in Islamist terrorist attacks, more than in any other European nation. On Macron’s watch, such assaults have been periodic and gruesome, including the decapitation of a teacher on the street outside a school in a quiet Paris suburb in 2020.
Macron seems uncowed. In Marseille, after his meeting on the housing estate, he slipped his suit jacket back on and stepped outside to face the chaotic throng, no barricades holding the public back, no filtering of the crowd. Young men in tracksuit bottoms pressed forward, as did teenagers with smartphones eager for a photo. Riot police formed a muscular, protective ring around the president and his bodyguards, but Macron wanted to let onlookers get close.
A young man in a white t-shirt and aviator shades, clutching a bottle of orange soda, threw his arm around the president’s shoulder. Two security guards promptly clamped his wrist and forearm, prising it away while a photo was taken, then released the man back into the crowd. Macron inched forwards, unmoved. A security guard later confessed to having sweated anxiously. When I asked the president the next day whether he had felt at personal risk, he dismissed the question: “No, I don’t think so, not at all. There are always isolated individuals. But I’ve never felt worried.”
Politically, too, Macron seems as ready as ever to take a calculated gamble. He campaigned for more Europe when Euroscepticism held sway at home, and within Europe for “strategic autonomy” – the idea that the eu should be prepared to defend itself – long before it was fashionable. “I’ve often been reproached for being alone in making proposals,” he once said. “One sometimes has to accept being alone, being an ice-breaker; afterwards you need to bring others behind you.”
This free-wheeling approach frequently prompts exasperation. His comment to The Economist in 2019 that nato was “experiencing brain death” sent a tremor through the Western alliance which his own diplomats scrambled to contain. Macron judged that it opened up a much-needed debate. “He’s like a rugby player who does a forward throw,” says Clément Beaune, his Europe minister and a close ally. “It’s not totally within the rules. But sometimes it frees up a difficult situation…The word that is most foreign to him is conservative.”
Even France’s friends concluded in the early years that Macron’s go-it-alone diplomacy trampled over others, with little regard for alliance-building. His ambition often outreaches his means. Macron’s candidate for mayor of Paris spectacularly failed to win, and he has never built En Marche into a properly organised party. His attempt to conduct pension reform ended in failure: it was met with the longest-lasting strikes since 1968, then shelved when France went into lockdown. “He’s influential in framing the debate. But achieving results is something else,” says Jean Pisani-Ferry, an economist who drew up his election manifesto. “People may believe that he’s right, but be reluctant to follow his reasoning enough to follow his lead.” The pandemic has put to the test his urge to control, to dictate, to set the pace (Macron himself caught covid in the winter of 2020). In the end, he conceded wryly, the “master of time is the virus”.
As Macron climbs aboard a two-masted sailing boat in Marseille on the final morning of the trip, I think back to the upbeat young adviser I first met nearly a decade ago. There is a little less of that boyish sense of possibility, now, a little more of the weight of office. The lined face, the grey hairs, speak of the toll, of the coffins of those who have fallen to covid-19, terror or war. Or perhaps of reforms unfinished or diplomatic ambitions unfulfilled.
The resilience he acquired over his relationship with Brigitte has hardened during the presidency
I don’t detect any sign that these setbacks have tempered his underlying self-belief. Edouard Philippe, whom Macron sacked in 2020 as prime minister, put it well when he spoke of the president as being made of unusual “metal”. If anything, the resilience he acquired during the many years of disapprobation in Amiens over his relationship with Brigitte has hardened during the presidency. “I’ve seen him preoccupied, grave,” says Beaune. “But I’ve never seen him give up, or become resigned, even during difficult moments.” Macron once told me that he is like his half-breed dog, Nemo: someone who never really fits in.
Lecturing, haughty, technocratic, distant, elitist, authoritarian: the torrent of criticisms still flows. But the president is often at his best when backed into a corner, forced to improvise, think or punch his way out. “Au combat”, as he likes to put it. As the Marseille tour proceeds, it strikes me that Macron had chosen the right city to put his renewal to the test. His trip marked an ambition, above all, to persuade its unpredictable, boisterous, defiant people to look at him differently, as if to say: if I can reconnect with Marseille, I can reconnect with France.
Bon-jour!” the president calls out, striding into a primary-school classroom which, like many in Marseille, has seen better days. Downstairs, broken panels hang from the ceiling. Teachers say that in winter pupils wear coats at their desks to keep warm. Outside, another small crowd of anti-vax protesters has gathered across the street. Macron crouches down to answer pupils’ questions, his favourite operational mode. “Can you catch covid twice?” asks one. “How much do you earn?” ventures a little girl by the window. Her classmate drops her head into her folded arms in embarrassment. The president grins and bats back the answer (€8,500 a month, post-tax).
Later that evening, after the cameras stop rolling and guests begin to leave at the end of his speech in the Palais du Pharo gardens, the primary pupils crowd around him, calling out more questions. “Are you staying for the weekend?” “Did you come by aeroplane?” One little girl in a pink cardigan is overcome by the occasion and bursts into tears. For a short moment, the president seems unexpectedly at a loss. He pulls a grimace, embarrassed and a little gauche, touches her head and puts an arm around her shoulder.
As he campaigns for a second term, can Macron really persuade the French that he might become a less remote, more likeable president? The pandemic has already recast the one-time liberal as an interventionist protector: of jobs, businesses, classroom time, even daily lives. He has made other changes, too. He replaced the historian who was in charge of his communications team with a public-relations professional. The 18th-century Louis XV-style golden desk, once used by de Gaulle, has been swapped for a sleek black modern one. He uses shorter words and fewer abstract nouns. And, in May last year, he opened up the Elysée palace to McFly and Carlito, popular YouTubers, and took part – in a suit, naturellement – in a game of “true or false”. The clip was viewed over 10m times. His advisers note that the share of “very unfavourable” opinions of the president has dropped from 50% to 27% in the past three years.
Macron has spent his life refusing to be held back by the perceptions of others. But the remoteness that helped propel him to success could now become a liability. The president cannot visit every French housing estate or primary school. Nor will he ever credibly look dishevelled. The underlying tension in France between presidential grandeur and people-pleasing will not vanish.
Macron told me that he is like his half-breed dog, Nemo: someone who never really fits in
Yet in Marseille, as elsewhere since, Macron is at last trying to correct the narrative of arrogance and distance that feeds rejection and populist support, and even undermines his elected authority. In the past he has argued that government cannot rely on cold rationality and reason alone: it has to conjure common feeling. A few weeks after returning from Marseille, I went out to Poissy, a suburb in west Paris, where Macron hung up his suit for 90 minutes and pulled on a football top to play in a charity match, during which his teammates shrewdly allowed him to score a penalty. In January this year, to howls of indignation from the opposition, he went full demotic, declaring that he wanted to emmerder (piss off) those who refused to get vaccinated.
If Macron does manage this reinvention, it will be because he seeks admiration, not affection: his urge is to leave a mark on history, a desire to show others, perhaps himself, what he is capable of. “It’s a psychological, intellectual and physical challenge,” Macron told me. “You have to be able to propose, to push, sometimes to fail, but also to be able to set off again on a conquest the next day to get things moving again.” A heroic presidency of this sort needs a lead character. The question, which he appeared to be wrestling with in Marseille, is whether he can adapt it for a second act.
The challenge plays to his vanity as well as his sense of adventure. “When I was a child, a teenager,” Macron told me shortly after he was elected, “what fascinated me was people who were extraordinary.” Even now, as he nears the end of his term, he speaks often of “heroes”: of firefighters and résistants, scientists, explorers and other “extraordinary” people. Lurking inside the besuited technocrat is a romantic – and inside the earnest former banker is a boyhood dream of heroism. In the book he wrote before his election, “Révolution”, Macron said that he has long wanted to live “my own adventure”. His presidency has certainly been that.
If anything, the drama of his first term seems to have galvanised him. In Marseille, Macron looked to be readying himself for a second episode. As the sinking sun spread a violet light over the gardens above the port, he told his audience: “If we can’t succeed in Marseille, we can’t make a success of France.” As befits a leader attached to the public theatre of politics, his words carry many meanings. If Macron can’t bring a city like Marseille with him, his adventure could be short-lived and solitary. But if he can finish the reinvention he started in Marseille, he may yet be able to win over France.■
Sophie Pedder is The Economist’s Paris bureau chief and author of “Revolution Française: Emmanuel Macron and the Quest to Reinvent a Nation”
在马克龙抵达之前,高楼大厦被擦拭得干干净净,停靠的地方挤得满满当当,就像在宣言中的要点一样:一所小学、一家医院、一个警察局、一个社区中心。还有欧洲,在海滨的米其林三星餐厅Le Petit Nice与意大利总理马里奥-德拉吉(Mario Draghi)进行了四个小时的会谈。还有就是拯救地球,在一个阴霾的早晨,马克龙乘坐一艘属于环保非政府组织的摇摆不定的船,前往地中海的卡朗克斯保护区。
马克龙不知从何而来,不属于任何党派系统,并藐视意识形态标签
2017年,马克龙震惊了全国,当时他39岁,夺得了最高职位,在建立了自己的政党(现在称为La République En Marche)后仅一年就粉碎了法国的战后政党。从任何标准来看,他的任期都是动荡的,既受到外部力量的冲击--大流行病和俄罗斯入侵乌克兰等--也受到国内动荡的冲击,包括恐怖袭击、1968年5月以来最长的法国罢工和 "黄衫军 "抗议活动。当选时,马克龙的吸引力部分来自于他的个性清新,没有被几十年的政治黑客行为所玷污,以及他对旧秩序的挑战。权力如何改变了这位年轻的伪君子?
我越是看到总统冰冷的名声和他本人的态度之间出现差距,我就越是开始怀疑马克龙是否给自己设了一个陷阱。在2017年的竞选活动中,他敲门(为此他被嘲笑),并在全国各地进行 "大游行",询问人们对政府的要求。他在市政厅举办了低成本的活动,他乘坐火车前往,坐的是二等座。在集会上,这位候选人对那些对他的对手的名字发出嘘声的人群进行了安抚,并承诺会进行善意的监督。他的政党当时被称为 "En Marche",是围绕着基层网络建立的,尽管它最终成为一个华而不实的企业--由他自己管理,为自己服务。他把联系放在任何安全问题之上,有一次,他不听劝告,涉足在他的家乡亚眠市的一家洗衣机工厂外焚烧轮胎的工会成员的敌对人群,这很有名。