NO other French politician, not even President François Hollande or any of his rightist rivals, is as much in the media’s focus these days as the economy minister Emmanuel Macron.
Only in his late thirties and appointed to his current function a year and half ago, Macron continues causing political avalanches, frequently criticising his own Socialist party, and often even President Hollande to whom he says “he owes no obligation”.
As if this was not enough, he exploded a bombshell recently by publicly announcing he was launching his own political movement which would take its distance from the party in power in next year’s presidential election.
“I’ve always been a man of the Left,” he explained to the media, “but lately I find myself far from being convinced by the Socialist party’s policies.” (Journalists were quick to point out that the initials of Emmanuel Macron’s movement En Marche that can be translated in English as “March Forward” were not different from those of his own name).
Reactions from the Socialist party bigwigs were instant. While its secretary general Jean-Christophe Cambadelis remarked Macron’s attitude was nothing else but high treason toward François Hollande, others warned against “an eventual and fatal stab in the back by Brutus to Julius Caesar”.
For the past two weeks newspapers, magazines and radio and TV channels have discussed on everyday basis Macron’s almost certain emergence as a presidential candidate in next year’s election. The Socialist party for its part called an emergency meeting last Monday to which Macron, coincidentally, was not invited.
On its part the daily Libération, a Leftist newspaper, hastily organised an opinion poll that puts Macron way ahead of François Hollande as the next President of France.
Holland’s reaction was perplexed, to say the least. In a live TV interview he said: “Macron is part of my political team and in addition he owes me a personal loyalty.”
However, Macron’s sudden and totally unexpected popping up into the national limelight remains far from being a purely political event. The April 14 issue of the weekly Paris Match carried a lavishly illustrated feature spread on four pages about his family life. The revelations astonished a majority of the readers.
As a teenage student in a college in the city of Amiens where he was born, Macron remained more than respectfully attached to a lady professor who was some 20 years his senior, married to a banker and mother of three children. Later when he moved to Paris for higher studies in the early 1990s he wrote to her a passionate love letter promising to marry her one day ‘no matter what happens’.
This he did in 2007 at age 30. By this time she was over 50 and had many grandchildren. Brigitte Macron told Paris Match the age difference was really of no importance and the main priority for her now remained backing her husband in his political ambitions, “or whatever else he plans to achieve”. In the pictures published by the magazine one observes many scenes of the private life of the couple. A photo shows the economy minister on vacation with his wife, her grandchild in his lap, feeding it with a milk-bottle.
In the interview Brigitte Macron appears more than entranced by her husband’s person and his qualities: “He is a workaholic, a chevalier, a being from some other planet who combines his rare intelligence with an exceptional humanity. He is a philosopher, an actor turned into a politician, a writer yet to create his chef d’oeuvre.”
Later questioned by a journalist Macron said the Paris Match interview was a mistake that he and his wife regretted. But a number of people in France believe that is hardly the end of the matter and there are many more surprises in waiting.
—The writer is a journalist based in Paris
Published in Dawn, May 1st, 2016
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