PARIS — The last time Emmanuel Macron was spotted in public, he was sporting a dark aviator’s jacket, Top Gun sunglasses and a black baseball cap.
His incognito rock star look, as he voted in the coastal town of Le Touquet Sunday, attracted plenty of attention on social media and rolling news channels.
But despite that moment of swagger, the truth is that Macron has taken a step back from public view lately. Apart from planned international commitments, he hasn’t been seen out and about for almost two weeks.
Last Sunday, instead of Macron appearing on television to comfort his wounded troops after a stunning defeat in the first round of the parliamentary election, the Elysée Palace issued a brief statement from the president calling for unity.
For the first time, Macron’s centrist alliance, already bruised and battered after a defeat in June’s European election, has been waging a desperate battle without its leader.
And the reality is his allies don’t want him on the campaign trail: Macron’s face is even being removed from campaign literature.
“He was told to stop [campaigning] … And it’s not really that he heard our message, it’s more that he was forced to hear it,” said a Renaissance party official, who was granted anonymity to discuss a sensitive issue.
“[The president] underestimated how much the public were turned off by his personality,” the official added.
In recent weeks, several party heavyweights have lobbied for Macron to stay away from the campaign, in what one key ally called a necessary “de-Macronization.” One minister even admitted on public television that Macron’s image was “worn out.”
For the loquacious, daring 46-year-old president, who is forever grabbing the limelight, coming up with new ideas, disrupting the status quo, the new reality is not a comfortable one.
The Elysée bunker
But like a Napoleon forced into exile, Macron has returned to the drawing board and is preparing his next battle: ruling France after what is expected to be a resounding defeat on Sunday. The French president may have to enter into a “cohabitation” government with Marine Le Pen’s National Rally party, which is expected to command the largest group in parliament.
Over the past days, Macron has been busy shoring up his influence, appointing several top officials in France and pushing for allies to get key jobs in Brussels, drawing accusations from Le Pen that he was organizing “an administrative coup d’état.”
On Wednesday, the government’s spokesperson announced new appointments in the police and security forces after the weekly Cabinet meeting. Dozens of top military officials have also been appointed in the army, the navy and the air force.
More appointments were expected, but faced with a growing outcry over the administrative reshuffle, the president was forced to scale back his plan. One person familiar with talks at the Elysée ironically called it “a minor backtracking,” according to Playbook Paris.
Ensconced in the Elysée Palace, the president is also gaming next-day scenarios, which includes a sweeping victory for the far right, a hung parliament with the National Rally as its largest group, and a coalition excluding the far right, according to several officials.
Several Macron allies have floated the possibility of building a loose coalition, similar to what parties in Spain or Germany are able to do.
“Maybe it’s an opportunity to reinvent the way we govern,” said French PM Gabriel Attal on radio, adding that “a plural National Assembly” could emerge from the election, with “with several political groups from the right, the left and the center that could work together, one project at a time.”
But such an alliance depends on Sunday’s results and would only be possible if Macron agreed to work with the far left, or if the Socialists, the Greens and the Communists agreed to break with their coalition partner the France Unbowed. Both prospects appear very remote.
Still in the game
But how long will Macron stay away from the cameras? Not long it seems.
On Sunday evening, once the scale of the National Rally’s victory is known, the president will have to pivot to choosing a new prime minister, which could take weeks if there’s no clear majority in parliament.
“He will again take the lead as the guarantor of France’s institutions,” said the same party official quoted above. If the far right wins a very large majority, Macron would be under pressure to nominate the National Rally’s leader Jordan Bardella as prime minister. If not, the president could get involved in lengthy coalition talks with his current rivals on the left and the right.
But it’s hard to see how the relationships with Macron’s liberal allies will be mended and his image improved with the general public. His popularity rating has plummeted in recent weeks, according to several polls.
On the campaign trail, Attal, one of the few popular figures in government, smiles with gritted teeth when punters tell him they don’t like his boss. With French politics in turmoil, Macron has been described as “crazy,” “an agent of chaos” and blamed for overseeing a “fiasco.”
No amount of Top Gun mojo is going to change that in the short term.
Pauline de Saint-Remy and Laura Kayali contributed reporting.
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