When it comes to Emmanuel Macron in France, it quickly turns to what the president has done wrong in recent years.
He has failed to deliver on a number of election promises, and to French leftists, Macron is the epitome of capitalism, the epitome of cowardly climate policy or the cover-up of police brutality. More right-wing voters find him too weak on terrorism and security and find his immigration policy too lenient. The lower classes consider him arrogant and elitist, while part of the older political class consider him too young and inexperienced.
Based on all the criticism he has had to endure in recent years, you could conclude that Macron is an unpopular president. And yet in the second round of the elections this Sunday, according to an initial forecast, he was re-elected with more than 58 percent of the vote for a second five-year term.
“Emmanuel Macron has shown in recent years that he can rule, despite not delivering on all his promises,” said journalist Corinne Lhaïk, who followed Macron for years for a book about the president, about his success by telephone ahead of Election Day. “The Yellow Vest crisis, the corona crisis and the war in Ukraine have enabled him to emphasize his qualities. He is super committed to what he does” – books regularly describe that he is often the last to leave work at the Élysée – “he is good at analyzing problems and he has shown himself to be a real president who dares to make centralized decisions.” Because of this, many French people would see Macron as “a patron who solves crises for which he is not responsible in the best possible way”.
Also read: Five years of Macron: President des riches fought through crisis after crisis
European agenda
The president is also appreciated for his pro-European attitude, says political scientist Sylvie Strudel of the Université Paris-Panthéon-Assas on the phone. “His European agenda has always mobilized part of the electorate, and the war in Ukraine has increased that share because it has become clear to many citizens that the European project is also a peace project.” A contributing factor is that Macron’s opponent Marine Le Pen preached an anti-European agenda in the last round.
In addition, Macron’s left-nor-right stance attracts voters from both sides of the political spectrum, as it turned out from research from Strudel. “The economic policy that Macron advocated during the corona crisis can be called social-democratic: it was redistributive and protective of citizens,” she says, referring to the enormous aid packages that the government has issued to protect companies and citizens. “So you can’t say he’s über-liberal. But in a number of other areas, such as labor market and pension reforms, he has clearly taken a more right-wing position.”
The book that Lhaik wrote about Macron is called for this reason President Cambrioleur, roughly translated ‘the thieving president’, because he has taken ideas (and voters) from left and right. In this book, the journalist also describes how endearing Macron can be: people who meet him for the first time are often charmed by his smile, body language (he often puts a hand on the arm of the person he is talking to) and the interest he shows. . “He has the capacity to seduce when he is face to face with someone. He has an exceptional concentration: when he is talking to someone, he never looks at his mobile and his eyes don’t wander. He looks his interlocutor straight in the eye and gives the impression that that person is the most important in the world at that moment.”
He has the capacity to seduce when he is face to face with someone
Corinne Lhaik author of book on Macron
This helped the president during the grand debates with citizens following the Yellow Vest protests. But according to Lhaïk, this quality actually works mainly in one-on-one conversations. “When Macron talks to a large audience, he is less successful in seducing people. Then he can have a way of talking that is very honest, direct and hard. That can shock him.”
He sometimes catches that tone in interviews and promotional films. In 2018, for example, many French people fell over a video distributed by the Élysée in which Macron complains about the “insane pile of money” that the state spends on social security, while “the people still remain poor”. Also the interview with Le Parisien in which he said at the beginning of this year that he wanted to harass unvaccinated French (he used it from merde (poo) derived verb bucket), sparked shock.
Popularity is relative
Despite his strengths, the popularity of the president is relative. “Macron is lucky that he actually had no legitimate competitors,” Strudel says. According to her, the eleven other presidential candidates did not have the right experience and attitude to mobilize large groups of French people. “I would like to know what would have happened if there had been a real candidate against him: for example a left-wing and credible politician who can provide real opposition.” Lhaïk says that in these elections “only the extreme candidates stood out,” such as the much-discussed radical right-wing opinion maker Éric Zemmour and the nationalist-populist Marine Le Pen, who came in second on Sunday. “But they stand out because they are very ideologized and not because they could rule well.” From a survey by research agency Elabe It also shows that of the Le Pen and Zemmour first-round voters, only 9 and 5 percent, respectively, chose them because of their “crisis resolution capacity.” With Macron and the centre-right Pécresse, that percentage is 68 and 15 percent.
Also read this analysis: Marine Le Pen advances with radical right program under ‘cloak of everydayness’
Both Macron experts underline that the tensions that have surfaced in France in recent years as a result of the Yellow Vest crisis have not yet disappeared. Lhaïk: “During the Yellow Vest protests, Macron’s popularity has plummeted and normally a president does not emerge from a crisis of this magnitude. It is exceptional that Macron has managed to climb out, but that does not mean that the problems highlighted by this movement have been solved – far from it.”