Presidential: Emmanuel Macron, an ambition still in motion

In five years, the hair has turned gray at the temples, the features of the face have hardened, the first furrows have dug on his forehead.

Blame it on the passage of time, of course.

Above all, the exercise of power.

The young face of Emmanuel Macron, elected president in 2017 at the age of 39, now bears the scars of the trying presidential function.

It must be said that this five-year term, shaken by crises, was not a long calm river. 

Emmanuel Macron the elusive

Benalla affair, Yellow Vests crisis, strikes against pension reform, Brexit, Covid-19 health crisis, forced withdrawal of French troops from Mali.

Then the Russian invasion in Ukraine to complete the last weeks of its five-year term, dangerously raising the specter of a third world war at the gates of Europe.

"Apart from the termite invasions, little will have been spared Emmanuel Macron", loose Claire Gatinois, journalist at the political service of Le Monde.

Not enough, however, to put him off to exercise a second term.

After an endless false suspense, Emmanuel Macron finally announced that he was again a candidate for the presidential election on March 3, 38 days before the first round, hoping to keep his place at the Élysée. 

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After five years at the head of the state, in the turpitudes of power, do the French really know Emmanuel Macron?

His supporters say he is daring, conquering, seductive, protective.

His detractors call him arrogant, Jupiterian, ultraliberal or "president of the rich".

Everyone will agree on its elusive character.  

French President Emmanuel Macron at the Élysée Palace on February 24, 2022, a few hours after the start of the Russian army's invasion of Ukraine.

© Ludovic Marin, Reuters

The story of this Head of State begins on May 14, 2017. Emmanuel Macron is elected President of the French Republic with 66.1% of the votes cast against the candidate of the National Rally, Marine Le Pen.

Without any prior elective mandate, he entered the Élysée at only 39 years old, becoming the youngest president in the history of the French Republics.

Who would have bet on his name a year before the election?

Nobody.

Except for him, maybe.  

The rise of an ambitious  

The ambitious man was born on December 21, 1977 in Amiens, in a family of the bourgeoisie of this city of Picardy.

Son of a neurologist and a medical adviser to Social Security, this eldest of three siblings leads a privileged existence, punctuated by piano lessons, sports, school, skiing and hiking holidays. the stranger.

Winner of the general French competition at the age of 16, the young student signs an almost faultless school career.

A hitch, however, tarnishes the pretty picture.

First educated at La Providence in Amiens, his parents forced him into exile in Paris in order to get away from the forbidden passion he had with Brigitte Trogneux, his theater teacher twenty-four years his senior.

He continued his education at the prestigious Lycée Henri IV,

joined Sciences Po Paris and obtained a DEA in political philosophy at the University of Nanterre before entering the ENA (National School of Administration) in 2002. A pure product of the French elite in short.

A failure all the same: he failed twice in the entrance examination to the École Normale Supérieure (ENS). 

Upon leaving the ENA, his meteoric rise continued.

He joined the body of the General Inspectorate of Finance.

In 2007, at age 30, he was appointed deputy general rapporteur of the Attali commission.

The following year, he went on leave from the civil service to become an investment banker at Rothschild.

He negotiates large international contracts and makes a fortune.

In the social-liberal seraglio that he continues to rub shoulders with, Alain Minc, Jean-Pierre Jouyet, Jacques Attali detect the potential of the thirty-something.

In May 2012, Emmanuel Macron left the banking establishment to join François Hollande, who had just been elected president.

The one who made finance his "adversary" during a speech at Le Bourget, appoints the investment banker in his government.

So much for the picture,

the socialist president is not except for a paradox.

Seduced by his youth and his confidence, he first made him his deputy secretary general of the presidency before appointing him Minister of the Economy in 2014 after the shattering departure of Arnaud Montebourg.

Emmanuel Macron becomes, at 37, the youngest tenant of Bercy.

"He has charm, a quick mind, he is familiar (…) kisses you, winks at you", says Manuel Valls in Élysée confidential, then Minister of the Interior.

Political betrayal is on the way.  

The treason 

During the day, he defends the Macron law to "unlock the French economy", a text decried on the left and adopted thanks to article 49.3, that is to say without a vote of Parliament.

In the evening, he gives dinners in town, consults political observers and ends up launching his movement in April 2016. No one seriously believes in his chances of becoming president.

In any case, not François Hollande.

On Tuesday, August 30, 2016, Emmanuel Macron nevertheless brought his resignation to the Élysée.

In the months that followed, he won over a large part of the traditional Socialist Party electorate, who saw him as the natural heir of social democracy, anxious to put an end to the political divisions of the past.

He even manages to make people forget that the results of François Hollande's five-year term,

judged very severely by a majority of French people, is also partly his own.

Less than a year later, he takes the place of the one who dubbed him into politics and settles in the gold of his office at 55 rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré.  

Was macronism born?

"He does not exist, there is Emmanuel Macron, who is a free being, who thinks for himself and who decides", assures Jean-Pierre Chevènement, supporter of the first hour.

Elected on the promise of numerous reforms, he begins to exercise his mandate "sword drawn".

Embracing the verticality of his function and of the institutions of the Fifth Republic, he decided on the essentials on the advice of his secretary general at the Élysée, Alexis Kohler.

The first year of his five-year term, the "master of the clocks" is carrying out reforms that disarm part of the socialist electorate who brought him to power.

First by appointing a Prime Minister from the right.

Then reforming the  

Five turbulent years 

There are also little sentences that go wrong.

"People who are nothing", the "refractory Gauls" or "the first of the rope" tarnishes the image of the young head of state.

Despite criticism, the president charts his course.

However, things got more complicated the following year.

In 2018, the Benalla affair marks the beginning of a succession of crises that will shake the presidency.

This French judicial and politico-media dossier deals a fatal blow to the reform of the institutions at the heart of its promises and tarnishes a presidency which wanted to be exemplary.

Then the pension reform strikes and the Yellow Vests crisis plunged the country into chaos and gave some French people the feeling that the head of state was cut off from the realities of everyday life. 

French President Emmanuel Macron announces the new containment measures in a televised address from the Elysee Palace, October 28, 2020. © Christian Hartmann, Reuters

But it is in the "tragic of history" that "the man of storms", as François Bayrou likes to call him, "reinvents himself".

Taken full force by the Covid-19 pandemic, Emmanuel Macron who declares France "at war" against an "invisible enemy", signs the end of the liberal rigor of his five-year term.

The health warlord puts the French economy on respiratory assistance and enters the era of "whatever the cost".

It confines and deconfines the French to the rhythm of successive waves of the epidemic and places in hospitals and "fucks" in passing those refractory to the vaccine pass.

At the end of the health crisis and at the start of the conflict in Ukraine, the president's popularity rating, carried by the "flag effect",

crosses record levels to make its two predecessors pale.

Intoxicated by these new figures or too monopolized by the war, Emmanuel Macron constantly postpones his entry into the presidential campaign.

New salvo of criticism from his political opponents who make his absenteeism in the debates yet another proof of his contempt. 

By all the gods of Olympus, the president "Jupiterian" assures him however, the president of 2017 will not be that of 2022 if he is elected.

Engaged in a final sprint and closely followed by the candidate of the National Rally in the second round polls, the outgoing president multiplies the mea culpa and the text explanations to those who doubt his sincerity at the same time as the main lines of his program.

If re-elected, he will become the first president, excluding cohabitation, to win a second term.

What fuel once again the resentment of François Hollande. 

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