46 The New York Review1.
The suits of recent French presidents—
all men—say more than you might
expect of navy blue. Nicolas Sarkozy,
caught between the competing billion-
aire heads of France’s luxury empires,
navigated favoritism by dressing in the
Italian designer Prada. François Hol-
lande, the last Socialist president of
the country, was widely mocked for the
tight jackets that stretched around his
plump chest, making him look like he
didn’t know what size to wear. Deeply
unpopular and considered incompe-
tent, he did not run for reelection.
So it was a surprise to see photos in
mid- March of the current president,
Emmanuel Macron, unshaven and
in a black hoodie with the insignia of
French paratroopers, looking a little
like Ukrainian president Volodymyr
Zelensky. Macron is forty- four and is
usually well dressed in a slim blue suit.
When he ran for president five years
ago, he did what he could to present
himself as mature enough for the job.
Tabloids reported that he had trained
his voice to sound deeper. Now, it
seemed, he wished to send a different
message: war had returned to Europe,
and he, like Zelensky, was leading the
people—albeit from a gilded room in
the Élysée Palace rather than a bunker
in besieged Kyiv.
For weeks Macron had scarcely ad-
mitted that he was running for reelec-
tion. As his old far- right rival, Marine
Le Pen, and his new far- right rival, Éric
Zemmour,^1 sparred in the press to see
who could offer the most outrageous
proposals about immigration and racial
identity in France, Macron held himself
apart. He did not announce his candi-
dacy until the beginning of March, and
when he did so it was not with a speech
but with “a letter to the French,” which
he released less than twenty- four hours
before the legal deadline to be on the
ballot in the first round of voting on
April 10, and which appeared in sev-
eral newspapers.
Perhaps buoyed by his initial lead in
the polls, which soon evaporated, he
refused to debate the other candidates
vying for the presidency. In fact, he re-
fused even to campaign until the last
minute. When the main French broad-
caster, TFI, hosted a televised event on
March 14 bringing together eight of the
twelve people still in the race, Macron
insisted that he would participate only
if each one was questioned alone by two
journalists. For nearly three hours, the
candidates stood awkwardly onstage,
one after the other, and spoke about
the retirement age or energy prices.
Instead, Macron has concentrated
his attention on Ukraine: to date, he
has spoken more than a dozen times
each with Vladimir Putin and Zelen-
sky, who suggested to The Economist
on March 25 that he was not particu-
larly impressed with Macron’s regular
conversations with Putin before and
after the invasion. France and other
countries are “afraid of Russia,” Ze len-sky said.^2 Macron’s diplomatic effort
has given the somewhat bizarre impres-
sion that his interests are elsewhere and
that he simply hasn’t the time to earn
anyone’s vote.On April 10, Macron came out ahead
of the eleven other candidates with
nearly 28 percent of the vote, but Le
Pen was less than five percentage points
behind him. A low turnout, especially
among younger voters, did not work in
his favor. If the same occurs in the sec-
ond round on April 24, Le Pen could
become president, with drastic conse-
quences for both France and Europe.
The daughter of a convicted Holocaust
denier, whose party has been directly
funded by Russian bank loans in the
past, could assume power at the very
moment that Putin threatens Western
Europe and its security alliances. She
has said that as president, she would
push for what she calls a “strategic rap-
prochement” with Putin. If she wins,
Macron will have only himself to blame.
The election is his to lose.
The day after the vote, Macron was
interviewed by France’s BFM televi-
sion network in the northern French
town of Carvin, in the predominantly
working- class Pas- de- Calais, decidedly
Le Pen country. He was sitting in an
everyday corner café in what looked
like an attempt at the diner dispatchbeloved by American journalists in the
Trump era—except that Macron, now
out of his hoodie and back in his im-
maculate navy suit, was alone with the
reporter and cordoned off from other
customers.
The journalist Bruce Toussaint began
the interview by asking Macron what he
thought about the fact that in Carvin,
40 percent of locals backed Le Pen, 21
percent went for the far- left Jean- Luc
Mélenchon, and only 19 percent voted
for him: “What would you say to this
France, peripheral France, that strug-
gles, that often feels abandoned?” Ma-
cron’s smile cracked a bit, and he began
by congratulating himself on coming
in first. When he actually answered
the question, his words were garbled.
“When I see the fractures, when I see
the statistics you cite... my desire is to
go out and convince,” Macron said. But
he has not done much of either.
At a small campaign event in Pau
in the Pyrenees on March 15, Macron
spoke on a black dais with a white
column, before locals who had been
selected by the regional newspapers.
Behind him, the mountains were cov-
ered in mist. One woman complained
about a factory that had moved off-
shore. Forty-seven jobs had been lost.
A student asked an aggressive question
about climate change, then pressed him
on tax cuts for the rich. Another asked
about why it was so difficult for rural
students to be accepted by France’s top
schools.
Pau is a town of 75,000 people. Its
mayor, François Bayrou, is a close ally
of Macron’s. In the days leading upto the event, there had been specula-
tion in the press about the questions
Macron would receive from the audi-
ence. After an earlier campaign event
near Paris, reporters had revealed that
the questions had been submitted and
chosen in advance. Macron needed to
give the impression of a more authentic
dialogue this time. His answers often
delved deep into technical details—the
answers of a class presentation rather
than a president.
The war in Ukraine was barely men-
tioned. But after three hours, Macron
said he was going off to make an in-
ternational phone call—to Putin. He
hoped, he said, “to convince him to
return to negotiation.” “I’m not naive,”
he continued. But “there’s a path”—he
pointed to the mountains—“a ridge-
line.... We have to do everything we
can to find it.” Macron’s own path is
no longer as clear, and even if he is re-
elected, it may already be lost.2.
When Macron was elected president in
2017, he walked onto the stage in front
of the Louvre to the strains not of “La
Marseillaise” but of Beethoven’s “Ode
to Joy,” the official anthem of the Eu-
ropean Union. This was the first over-
ture of the “revolution” that he was
meant to bring: his election was billed
not merely as a watershed moment for
France but for all of Europe. “You have
chosen audacity,” Macron said to the
crowd gathered that chilly May night.
“And the audacity of a new future.”
Five years later, at the end of Ma-
cron’s first term, the “revolution” has
and has not arrived. It turned out to
be Macron himself who was—and
is—audacious, not so much his presi-
dency, which has unfolded during the
Trump administration, the corona-
virus pandemic, and now the return of
war to Europe. His election did con-
stitute a revolution in French national
politics, in the sense that it completely
overhauled the political establishment
as it had existed more or less since the
time of Charles de Gaulle, the found-
ing father of the Fifth Republic in 1958.
Since then power had changed hands
between some variation of de Gaulle’s
mainstream conservative party and
the Socialists, the champions of the
welfare state whose greatest president
was François Mitterrand. Macron,
who had been Hollande’s finance min-
ister, launched something of a coup:
he broke with his old boss, founded
his own party—initially named “En
Marche,” for his initials, E. M.—and
created the closest thing France has
ever had to a centrist “Third Way.” If
you vote in France today, you either
support Macron’s amorphous centrism
despite your misgivings, or you vote for
extremists of the right or the left.
Macron neither tried nor pretended
to be the président normal—the normal
guy—that Hollande had promised to be;
in fact, he strove to be quite the oppo-
site. From the beginning, he styled him-
self—unironically—as Jupiter, gazing at
his subjects from Olympian heights. He
is among the most image- conscious fig-
ures in European politics today. ShortlyMacron on the Precipice
James McAuley and Madeleine Schwartz
Emmanuel Macron; illustration by Romy Blümel(^1) See James McAuley, “Who Does Éric
Zemmour Speak For?,” The New York
Review, January 13, 2022.
(^2) “Volodymyr Zelensky in His Own
Words,” The Economist, March 25,
2022.
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