President Emmanuel Macron came within a hair's breadth of announcing his candidacy for re-election in a marathon, two-hour interview broadcast on Wednesday night.
The French leader is not expected to formally announce his candidacy until late January or early February, so he can continue to portray himself as above the fray. Opinion polls indicate he will lead the first round of voting on April 10th next.
The interview appeared calculated to defuse in advance issues which could threaten Macron’s bid for re-election, in particular accusations that he is arrogant and unfeeling.
Macron declared his love for France and its people, doubtless in the hope that they will love him back at the ballot box next April.
“I have learned to love the French people more, with more indulgence and benevolence,” he said. He admitted to having been “hard \[on his compatriots] at times... When I was elected, I loved France. And I can tell you, I love her even more madly than before. We are a people who put their trust in a young man of 39,” he added, referring to his age when he took office.
Shows of emotion do not come easily to Macron, who is more at ease in the role of head of the class. He has at times called certain French people lazy or illiterate and once accused protesters of “creating a f**king bordello”.
Macron said that his most “unacceptable” remark was “when I talked about ‘people who have succeeded and those who are nothing’. It was, he said, “possible to get things moving without hurting people, and I won’t do it anymore”. He nonetheless qualified his apology, saying his remarks are often taken out of context.
Macron admitted to a degree of responsibility for the gilets jaunes or yellow vest protests that racked France in 2018 and 2019. Earlier in his presidency, he praised the “lead climbers” who pull society behind them. Now he speaks of the difficult lives of underpaid workers, of “this France which feels invisible”.
If Macron is to defeat a right-wing or extreme right-wing candidate in the April 24th runoff, he must win back some of the centre-left voters who were alienated by measures that favour the affluent, including partial abrogation of the wealth tax. He says he wants “a more just country” and vaunted massive government subsidies during the pandemic as a policy of “mutual assistance and solidarity”.
He has learned a great deal through a first term marked by successive crises, Macron said. He described himself as “humane” and “doubtless more sensitive to certain things than I was before”.
The first major crisis of Macron's presidency was the Benalla affair, when his bodyguard, Alexandre Benalla, was proven to have beaten up protesters on May 1st, 2018. Macron said Benalla was fired from the Élysée and punished. But he did not say that the Élysée kept Benalla on staff for 2½ months after learning of his behaviour, and fired him only when Le Monde newspaper revealed what he had done.
Macron attacked the far right-wing candidate Éric Zemmour’s promise to stop all immigration as “an absurdity” and said he did not believe in “the great replacement”, allegations by the far-right of a plot to overwhelm Europe’s Christian population with Muslim immigrants. He accused Zemmour of stigmatising all Muslims. “You cannot tell several million of our compatriots, ‘The problem is you’,” he said. To treat foreigners as the source of all problems risked precipitating a “war”, he added.
Middle ground
On economic policy, Macron sought the middle ground, as usual. Proposals by the radical left to cancel debt were “irresponsible”, he said. On the other hand, he called the promise by the conservative candidate Valérie Pécresse – who poses the greatest threat to his re-election– to cut 200,000 jobs in the civil service the “père Fouettard option”, after the mythical character who punishes naughty children at Christmas.
The pandemic taught him “humility”, Macron said. He recounted having seen “the most unbearable inequality” when visiting a family under lockdown in the immigrant banlieue of Seine-Saint-Denis. The parents told him: “If their children didn’t go to school, they would not eat.”
Macron said he would not make vaccination mandatory for children aged five to 11, though he recommends it. It was “entirely possible” that France will require vaccination of all adults. With 91 per cent of the population double vaccinated, obligatory vaccination had been virtually achieved, he said.
Macron refused to make his candidacy official. “Yes, I have ambition for my country, but I must still fulfil my function [\as president]\,” he said, adding that he would “act in the final quarter hour” while maintaining “a vision of the country over ten years”. In other words, two five-year presidential terms.