Candidate’s spouse in the spotlight
Long his mentor, despite 24-year age difference
If her husband becomes France’s next president, Brigitte Macron will be the most unusual first lady the country has ever seen.
While French first ladies have a checkered history — making headlines for excessive spending, extramarital affairs, treason and even murder — they’ve never been as central a figure in the formative years of their husbands’ lives as Brigitte has been for front-runner Emmanuel Macron.
Brigitte Macron, who is 24 years older than the candidate, has been his guide and coach since he was 15, and is playing an active role in his campaign, advising him on speeches and effectively helping set his agenda.
“Emmanuel Macron wouldn’t have been able to embark on this adventure without her,” said Marc Ferracci, a campaign adviser and a witness at the couple’s 2007 wedding. “Her presence is essential for him.”
Macron, the independent centrist, came in first in Sunday’s first round and will face far-right candidate Marine Le Pen in the May 7 runoff. Support for him poured in on Monday with politicians on the moderate left and right, including French President François Hollande and the losing Socialist and Republican party candidates in Sunday’s first-round vote, forming an alliance to block Le Pen’s path to power.
Perhaps in an effort to broaden her appeal to voters from outside the far-right National Front, Le Pen announced Monday that she was temporarily stepping down as the party’s leader so she could run as a candidate for “all the French.”
She denounced “the old and completely rotten Republican Front” — the coalition of mainstream parties allied against her. But with no plausible major reservoir of votes to add to the 21.5 per cent she received in the first round, Macron is expected to emerge the victor with 60 per cent of the vote. Brigitte Macron’s role is assured.
“If I’m elected — no, sorry, when we are elected — she will be there, with a role, and a place,” the 39-year-old candidate said of Brigitte, 63, on March 8 during a speech in Paris. “I owe her a lot, she helped make me who I am.”
Many of the wives of French leaders have found a place in the history books: Queen Marie-Antoinette’s lavish spending contributed to the fall of the French monarchy in the late 18th century and Empress Josephine was divorced because she couldn’t give Napoleon an heir. In 1914, Prime Minister Joseph Caillaux’s wife Henriette killed the editor of the newspaper Le Figaro because he was a political threat to her husband.
If the Macrons become the next residents of the Elysee palace, Brigitte will join a list of colourful first ladies.
In the 1980s and 1990s, while Socialist president François Mitterrand led a double life with the mother of his illegitimate daughter Mazarine, his wife Danielle had a love life of her own. Bernadette Chirac suggested to a biographer that she silently put up with the many infidelities of her husband Jacques, while Nicolas Sarkozy’s wife Cecilia left him for her lover just six months after he took office in 2007. In 2014, President François Hollande’s partner Valerie Trierweiler published a bitter tell-all book on him after his liaison with actress Julie Gayet became public.
For Macron and his wife, the challenge if he takes office in May will be to not let their unusual personal history — the couple’s age difference is the same as Donald and Melania Trump, only in reverse — become a distraction. The next French president enters a post-Brexitvote, post-Trump-election world facing a domestic economy that has made an anemic recovery with an unemployment rate still at 10 per cent.
An outspoken 5-foot-4 former high school teacher, Brigitte comes from a family renowned for its chocolate factory in the northern town of Amiens. She was a drama coach in 1992 when she met 15-year-old Macron. He acted in her theatre pieces, with their association developing into a romance that pushed her to divorce her husband and the father of her three children.
Even after more than a decade-long marriage, their extraordinary union raises eyebrows.
Aware that they are breaking the codes of bourgeois and conservative France, the candidate and his partner of over 20 years have been working to pre-empt any potential personal attacks.
“They’re an atypical couple and this strengthens their relationship,” said Ferracci.
They’ve opened the door to their lives, even being in the pages of glossy magazines like Paris Match and British Vogue.
“We don’t have a classic family, that’s an undeniable reality,” he said, with Brigitte at his side. “There is no less love in our family.”
MACRON WOULDN’T HAVE BEEN ABLE TO EMBARK ON THIS ADVENTURE WITHOUT HER.