LE PHONEY!
British liberals love him. But in France, the gloss is already coming off a President who seems to care more about publicity stunts than saving the economy
CHANNELLING his inner Tom Cruise, 39-year-old Emmanuel Macron strode across the runway at a Marseilles airbase the other day in a set of combat overalls.
This was a photo opportunity that the new French president hoped would portray him as an all-action hero. But in place of admiration, the pictures sparked widespread scorn.
For a start, his flight-suit was far too tight, revealing more of the presidential anatomy than the citizenry can have expected — or wanted — to see.
Moreover, the stunt reeked of cynical desperation, coming just days after General Pierre de Villiers resigned as chief of the French armed forces following a bitter dispute with Macron over military funding and command responsibilities.
Above all, his outfit was seen as highly inappropriate, given that he is the only president of the Fifth Republic without any military experience. Even his inept predecessor, Francois Hollande, did national service.
Yet, in a perfect illustration of his increasing vanity, Macron decided that he would be the first French president since Charles De Gaulle to don a military uniform in public.
De Gaulle, a World War I officer and leader of the French fight against Nazi tyranny, used to talk of ‘ the politics of grandeur’. Macron is flirting with the politics of embarrassment through his eagerness to project an ultra-cool, dynamic image.
The posing at the airbase is just part of a pattern. He summoned photographers to film him descending, James Bondstyle, from a helicopter on to the nuclear submarine Le Terrible; the raging Atlantic a dramatic backdrop to this crass publicity shot.
Ego
And in similar attempts to show his fitness, he is displaying a new interest in sport. He has been pictured playing football in Paris, sparring with a young boxer and joining a game of wheelchair tennis to promote the French capital’s bid to host the 2024 Olympics.
His mission to achieve coolness is not only physical. Along with his glamorous wife Brigitte — whom he seduced when he was a schoolboy and who is 25 years his senior — he’s burnished his celebrity by playing host to A-listers.
In a cringe-making reflection of Tony Blair’s Cool Britannia parties for rock stars at Downing Street, Bono and Rihanna visited the Elysee Palace.
‘I was very impressed and inspired by his leadership qualities,’ gushed Rihanna.
The French people do not seem so impressed.
Having won by a landslide in May, Macron’s ratings have dived. According to the latest poll, he’s dropped ten points in approval since his triumph, the biggest fall immediately after an election since Jacques Chirac in the summer of 1995, when France was suffering shocking levels of unemployment and the franc was under threat of devaluation.
Apart from antipathy to Macron’s Mr Cool image, there is suspicion of his oversized ego, as clearly evidenced in his row with General de Villiers.
‘ I am your leader,’ he petulantly told the chief.
One French newspaper claimed Macron’s ‘ little authoritarian fit’ showed he was drunk with power and it was time for him ‘to grow up’.
There is concern about his love of the trappings of his office, highlighted in his decision to receive Russian President Vladimir Putin at the Palace of Versailles, and President Trump at the Bastille Day military parade.
Not for nothing is Macron called ‘Jupiter’, the allpowerful Roman deity.
In another example of his arrogance, French mayors complain that his official portrait, sent to town halls, is bigger than that of any president since the Fifties.
But what is also disturbing — for France and for the rest of Europe — is that there is a danger this quest for fame will distract Macron from the central task of his presidency, which is to reform the sclerotic, over-centralised French economy. That mission is all too urgent, as many of us know.
For more than a decade, my wife and I have had a second home in France, first in Provence, now in the North-West. I adore French culture, but despair at the excessive regulation, the brutal taxation, the restrictive labour practices, the hostility to enterprise and the outdated protectionism.
Charisma
There are pockets of dynamism and genius in the French economy — as shown in the Airbus aerospace group, the nuclear industry and telecommunications — but they are held back by an all-toodominant public sector which employs more than a quarter of the national workforce.
Macron was elected to change that. His supporters like to see him as France’s answer to Blair, allying charisma to progressive values and economic modernisation.
He has the intellectual capacity and self- confidence to achieve reform. His wife described how, as his teacher, she was ‘ completely subjugated by the intelligence of this young man’ whose ‘mind is so full and perfect’.
His economic plan is undoubtedly bold. He has announced tax cuts worth £ 10 billion, including the abolition of the local charge on most homeowners (known as the taxe d’habitation) which is like council tax in this country and averages £800.
He has promised corporation tax will be reduced from 33 per cent to 25 per cent by 2022, that the fiscal deficit will be lowered to less than 3 per cent of GDP — it’s 3.4 per cent — and that the notoriously restrictive labour laws will be changed to allow employers to hire and fire more easily.
But the landscape of French politics is littered with the corpses of bold economic plans killed by Luddite opposition in the state sector.
Even now, just a few months into his presidency, Macron has come under ferocious assault from the Left, the
public sector establishment and the unions, which threaten action in the autumn to defend current labour laws.
That is why Macron needs to retain every ounce of his authority for the great struggle that lies ahead — not to squander his political capital through preening vanity.
He should heed the lesson of Tony Blair’s premiership. Blair’s drive to reform the public sector was comprehensively destroyed not only by New Labour’s righton social engineering, but also by his desire to be a leading player on the global stage, a craving that resulted in the bloodsoaked fiasco of the Iraq invasion.
In the end he achieved very little apart from building up a big national debt and presiding over a shameful decline in standards in public life.
Macron could look to the experience of Republican President Nicolas Sarkozy, who won the election decisively in 2007 on a platform of economic reform, but then dissipated his energies through his celebrity marriage to pop star, model and cosmetic surgery enthusiast Carla Bruni.
Ironically, Macron’s position is much weaker than Blair’s in 1997 or Sarkozy’s in 2007. He did not win because of enthusiasm for his campaign, but because, in the second round of voting, electors did not want toxic National Front candidate Marine le Pen.
Yet he did far worse against Le Pen than Jacques Chirac did against her father Jean Marie in 2002, when Chirac won more than 82 per cent of the popular vote, compared with Macron’s 66 per cent this year. According to one survey, barely more than half of Macron’s voters backed him out of conviction. That makes him deeply vulnerable.
The French like the prestige of the presidency, but not arrogance in the holder.
Brilliant and self-assured, Macron sees himself as a very new, very different figure in French politics. But if he carries on as he’s done in recent weeks, he will become that most familiar of European stereotypes: the failed president.