Suddenly, the inattentive viewer thinks he hears a candidate for a job interview who, when asked about his faults, admits: “I am too rigorous”. But this Monday, May 15, on TF1, it is indeed the President of the Republic who answers Gilles Bouleau’s questions and assures: “Sometimes, I am told ‘You are too hard, you are too determined, too energetic’.” What qualities thus identified.
However, the Head of State reacts to a reproach. “When we ask (the French) to attach an adjective to Emmanuel Macron, they say: ‘He is contemptuous, he does not know how to speak to us and he takes us high'”, has just launched his interlocutor. The president does not understand. He does not like, he says, “this adjective that we put in all the sauces” and “what the extremes had in (his) place”. No, he never heard anyone blame him like that. The proof, he stirs: “We do not go into contact as I have since I have been involved in political life, when we have contempt for people.” Him, contemptuous? This is beyond comprehension. “Contempt and vanity are foreign to him,” his friend Richard Ferrand used to enthuse.
During the presidential campaign, one of his close friends had however warned Emmanuel Macron: “We only attack you on behavioral problems. Youth is a huge asset but also a difficulty. a young person. He is more easily sued for arrogance.” The president-candidate had listened, and promised the disillusioned friend that he would change.
“But he is not aware of the hatred he arouses…”, swears another fellow traveler, sorry for this blindness. Why and how to change when we do not measure the extent of distrust… When we are convinced, as is the president, that only audacity is authentic, that it will be the justice of the peace and that action will be praised regardless of the tone used.
Simpler than reinvention therefore: the affirmation of one’s qualities. In this little game, the head of state has, on TF1, shown that he knows how to play, seizing the trial in contempt to continue to shell out the many assets of macronism. “Real contempt is lying to people. In the position I am in, if I really despised the French and the French, or our country, I would not try to speak to collective intelligence and do this which is good for the country, I would think of my apple.” Let the skeptics tell each other: Emmanuel Macron yields nothing to the lowering of public debate, he refuses ease and insincerity, philosophically accepts the self-sacrifice that public action requires and esteems his fellow citizens enough to impose on them a government roadmap set out in incomprehensible techno newspeak by its Prime Minister 15 days ago. “Everything had been reread and validated by the Elysée”, assures one in the entourage of Elisabeth Borne. No doubt the president hoped that “collective intelligence” would translate this cold and surgical policy into words.
In his book, president burglar (Fayard), journalist Corinne Laïk recounts a striking confidence made by a suddenly lucid Emmanuel Macron to one of his relatives, in 2018: “There are two things that I have not succeeded in, the French do not know who I am and I have failed to appease the country.” Before being loved, being understood.
