The magnificent mind of Emmanuel Macron
The president is a lonely, tragic figure whose strange
personality has inflicted chaos and carnage on French politics.
By JAMIL ANDERLINI
Illustration by HelloVon POLITICO
JULY 8, 2024 11:52 AM CET
https://www.politico.eu/article/magnificent-mind-emmanuel-macron-france-legislative-election/
Lounging with Emmanuel Macron in the lavish stateroom
aboard France’s Air Force One, I asked the French president who he confides in.
With whom does he share his deepest feelings when the burden of office weighs
him down?
At first, he didn’t seem to understand my question. To
help him out, I suggested perhaps his wife and former high school drama
teacher, Brigitte? His media adviser sitting across from us loved this idea and
eagerly encouraged him to endorse it.
Instead, Macron responded rather dismissively. After
another long pause and much rumination he finally hit upon the answer —
“myself,” he said.
I accompanied Macron and his entourage to China in
April last year on an official state visit, during which I spent many hours in
the presence of the president and his closest advisors, including two separate
sit-down interviews in the stateroom of his plane. Several of his retinue spoke
openly to me about the president and his personality, on the understanding they
would not be publicly identified.
Last month, in the wake of a crushing defeat in the
European Parliament election, Macron shocked even his closest advisers by
calling a snap election, and I was reminded of what I learned about him on that
trip.
Relying almost entirely on his own counsel, the
incredibly unpopular president took a great gamble, one that has thrown the
country’s politics into chaos.
On Sunday, in a record turnout, the French people
defied polling that had suggested the far right would be the biggest force in
the country’s parliament. Instead, a leftist alliance that includes a large
contingent of far-left parliamentarians garnered the most seats.
The result leaves Macron’s centrist coalition in
tatters, losing about one-third of its seats and on track for a distant second
place in the parliament. France is now more politically divided than it has
been in decades.
If the people I spoke to on my trip to China are
correct, the verdict doled out by the French people must be devastating on some
level for a president who — having become in 2022 the first in two decades to
secure a second term — seemed to have convinced himself that his audacity, his
powers of seduction and his chameleonic showboating would get him out of any
political pickle.
“Macron doesn’t listen to anyone,” one of his closest
advisers told me on the trip to China last year. “And he really hates losing.”
“He is the great seducer, he wants to seduce
everyone,” said another member of the inner circle. “But much of France has a
personal, violent hatred for him … he is too young, too handsome and too bright
for many French — and it is in our DNA to want to decapitate our leader.”
“He really deeply needs to be loved,” said another,
just out of earshot of the president as we relaxed over drinks on a river
cruise through the southern Chinese city of Guangzhou.
But Macron can take some solace in the thwarting of
his far-right bête noire. And at least he still remains the central character
in the drama of French politics.
* * *
The French president is a genuinely captivating
character — and not just for politics nerds. A psychiatrist friend of mine is
equally obsessed with the man whose advisers and public relations minions
describe as a master of pensée complexe — in other words, a complex mind.
They usually mean it in a “philosopher king,”
wunderkind kind of way. My friend means it more in the Oedipal, narcissistic
sense.
In person, Macron is magnetically charming — a
bantam-sized, handsome man with unusually large hands and a penetrating stare.
Each time the presidential jet was preparing for
takeoff last year, he would walk up and down the length of the Airbus A330
greeting and chatting with every single member of his delegation, including the
wait staff and even the three lowly journalists (including me).
“He is very kind, and the closer I get to him the more
impressed I am by him,” one of his inner circle told me. But “he hardly has any
friends, none of them are older and probably 80 percent of them are male; he
surrounds himself with advisers who are all young men and all of whom are
fascinated by him.”
At a distance, he comes across like a plastic
Napoleon; an ersatz Charles de Gaulle, the soldier, statesman and architect of
France’s post-war democracy.
“He has de Gaulle’s imagination but none of the
gravitas,” one person who worked closely with Macron when he was a Rothschild
investment banker told me a couple of weeks ago. “Perhaps calling the snap
election was the right political instinct, but it won’t work for one big reason
— Macron is hated by France with a vicious passion.”
Therein lies the Macronian paradox — he comes across
simultaneously as a global statesman with grand vision and an eager puppy
desperate for love.
He’s a man of interstellar ego who is deeply insecure;
a kind, charming and warm person with almost no friends; a retail politician
who cannot connect with or relate to the French public.
Why do people, especially “the people” of France, hate
him so much? As one of my expert colleagues says, he is a weirdo — seen as
arrogant, elitist, unrelatable and a stranger to the French.
It starts with his unorthodox relationship with
Brigitte. They met through a school play workshop when he was a 15-year-old
student and she was a married 39-year-old teacher with three children. They
married in 2007, when he was 29 and she was 54.
On his Wikipedia page, under the listing for family,
there are just two names: Brigitte Macron and “Nemo (dog).”
The French electorate is used to its presidents being
family men but also having mistresses, children out of wedlock, torrid affairs.
They didn’t despise former President François Hollande
because he had an affair with the glamorous French actress and film producer
Julie Gayet — if anything, the incident probably enhanced the pudgy, dorky
Hollande’s image.
They despised him because he looked ridiculous when
photographed riding pillion on a little scooter with an unflattering motorcycle
helmet.
Nothing is worse than looking ridiculous in the eyes
of French voters.
And while Macron might not appear ridiculous to a
French audience, he does often seem fake and insincere.
He somehow seems a bit less than human, a little too
perfect, like a humanoid robot that gets the human part a little bit wrong — a
concept known in robotics and computer animation as the “uncanny valley,” for
the unease and even revulsion it elicits in a viewer.
Indeed, it can sometimes seem as if he is playing the
character of the president of France, complete with cosplay photo shoots —
unshaven in a military hoodie in obvious emulation of Ukrainian President
Volodymyr Zelenskyy, or taking to a heavy bag in an intense boxing session.
“Everything is an act,” my psychiatrist friend said
recently. “He is always posturing and posing; the psychology of that is
fascinating and disturbing.”
* * *
On the trip to China last year, there was one tall,
military chap who went everywhere with the president and who sat near me on the
plane. At first, I assumed he was the soldier responsible for the French
nuclear “football” — the briefcase carrying the tools for the president to
launch a nuclear attack.
But not long into the trip, I realized his job was
actually to look after Macron’s extensive wardrobe and carry his many changes
of outfit.
On the three-hour flight between Beijing and
Guangzhou, I noticed at least three costume changes — from a formal suit when
we boarded, to a hoodie with “French Tech” emblazoned on the front, to a
different suit when we got off the plane.
Like an eager, thespian student trying to impress his
beautiful drama teacher, his costume changes between scenes were accompanied by
changes in demeanor, rhetorical style and body language.
From a more formal reception with the French community
in Beijing to a relaxed event at an art gallery, to touring a university campus
in southern China, where he was greeted like a rock star (“It’s amazing how
much they love him; he couldn’t set foot on a French campus these days,” one of
his entourage told me) — Macron played a different character in each setting.
The most jarring character shift came at a formal
ceremony with Chinese leader Xi Jinping in the Great Hall of the People in
Beijing’s Tiananmen Square. Macron stepped onto the stage looking very severe,
almost scowling.
The Chinese dictator spoke for just eight minutes,
reading a perfunctory, prepared speech off a piece of paper. Then it was
Macron’s turn; without notes, speaking directly to Xi in a highly performative,
almost lecturing, style that was clearly aimed at the cameras and any French
people watching.
Xi’s entourage of sycophantic ministers grew
increasingly uncomfortable as the lecture continued: 10 minutes, 15 minutes, it
just went on. Xi, who is treated in the Chinese system as a modern-day emperor,
blinked furiously and looked as if he’d just swallowed a particularly noxious
frog. At around the 21-minute mark, he let out a clearly audible sigh — intense
impatience emanating from every pore of his body.
Macron seemed blithely unaware. His speech went on
three times longer than Xi’s — an unforgivable breach of protocol in the
Chinese system, especially since it came from the leader of a former colonial,
barbarian country that has now fallen on hard times.
By the end, Xi’s ministers could not contain their
agitated muttering and fidgeting.
“Macron will not let you leave a meeting until he is
convinced he has managed to convince you, that he has convinced whoever he is
speaking to,” said one of his inner circle.
The problem is, his insistence can easily backfire.
During the trip to China, “His advisers told him to
speak with respect and humility to Xi Jinping — but that is quite hard for any
president of France,” one senior official involved in the trip told me. “He
said the words of respect, but that is not how Xi interpreted them.”
Quixotic efforts to convince other world leaders make
up a recurring theme for Macron.
With former United States President Donald Trump, his
attempt at a charm offensive — complete with military parades and perversely
rigorous handshakes — seemed to work at first but ultimately backfired.
“He hated Trump a lot,” one close adviser told me. “He
was overconfident he could personally charm him, and it failed.”
Similarly, as Europe braced for Russia’s full-scale
invasion of Ukraine in early 2022, Macron insisted only he could convince
Vladimir Putin not to realize his dream of reconstituting the great Russian
empire.
“France believed until the last minute that Putin
wouldn’t invade Ukraine,” one senior European Union official with access to top
intelligence briefings told me late last year.
Pumped up on hubris and disdainful of intelligence
from the United States, other European leaders and even his own diplomats,
Macron shuttled to Moscow to seduce the Russian dictator into backing down.
Instead, he was treated to humiliating dismissal at
the end of an extraordinarily long table.
“Putin was another failed project,” one of his
advisers told me.
* * *
On the China trip, one of the things that most struck
me was how Macron appeared to be winging things, with little or no input from
the French diplomatic service or anyone with deep knowledge and expertise on Xi
Jinping’s China.
The Chinese Communist system has legions of experts
who prepare voluminous tactical briefings so Xi can gain advantage in any
interaction with foreign governments. They prepare extensive psychological
profiles on leaders like Macron so that Xi can know when to flatter, when to
threaten and when to cajole.
“I think [Xi] rather sees France as having a
leadership role,” Macron told me in one of our interviews. “And with regards to
leaders who last … he respects them. And then he understands our logic of
building strategic, financial and military autonomy.”
For the Chinese Communist Party, these are the words
of a useful idiot. Macron is not an idiot — far from it — but nobody can be the
smartest person in the world on every single topic. It was totally clear to me
that he was unprepared for the flattery and manipulation the Chinese system is
famous for.
It was also clear that his desperate desire to be
loved by his audience made him willing to make major concessions to a
totalitarian dictator.
The well-prepared Xi easily played on Macron’s
“strategic narcissism” (as American diplomats like to call it) to extract all
sorts of rhetorical concessions, including on the crucial topic of Taiwan — a
democratic, self-ruled nation that Beijing threatens to absorb by force.
The same character flaws I saw up close in China have
led Macron and the French nation to this critical moment.
Locked up with a tiny coterie of sycophants, he made
the fateful decision to call a snap election without consulting anyone but
himself — one more bold gamble befitting his dream role of the audacious,
heroic president of France.
In the process, he has driven the embittered French
electorate to the extreme right and extreme left. Even if he is able to form a
functioning government in the coming days and weeks, he has left the French
polity deeply divided.
In the past, Macron’s main pitch to the electorate was
that only by choosing him and his party would they avoid what he describes as
the horror of a far-right government of neofascists.
He may have avoided that outcome this time, but he has
further fractured France and left the country even more ungovernable.
My strong impression is that Macron remains the eager
drama student trying to seduce all the audiences he performs for. When he
doesn’t get the love he craves, he tries out a different character, a different
performance.
You (the audience) don’t love me? Well, how about I
play Zelenskyy? How about de Gaulle? What about a snap election?
One close adviser told me Macron hardly ever sleeps
and feels imprisoned in the Elysée Palace, the official residence of the French
president in the center of Paris.
So he walks around the city at night on his own.
For some reason, I can’t get this image out of my mind
— the lonely thespian who nobody understands, who listens to nobody but
himself, wandering the beautiful streets of Paris in the dark, playing the
tragic figure of the embattled president of France.
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