France’s prime minister was out and about on Monday mixing with the proles south of Paris. “I’m going to shake your hand because you’re all right,” said one old man, accepting the outstretched hand of Gabriel Attal. “But you’ll have tell the president to shut his trap.”
Attal didn’t quite know how to respond, mumbling that he was campaigning for the parliamentary and not the presidential elections. The old man wasn’t finished. “Listen, you’re not doing too bad… but the president, he’s the one causing all the trouble.”
‘I don’t want to represent a country that doesn’t correspond to our values,’ said Mbappé, a footballer friend of Emmanuel Macron
It will have been a sobering encounter for Attal, proof of what Marine Le Pen said earlier in the month: that every time Macron opens his mouth he sends more people her way.
So despised is the president of the Republic that some of his Renaissance Party’s candidates have decided not to feature his face on their campaign posters for the parliamentary elections on June 30 and July 7.
The opinion polls confirm his unpopularity; the latest has Le Pen’s National Rally on 33 percent, the left-wing Popular Front coalition on 28 percent and Macron’s centrist coalition on 18 percent.
On Sunday, Macron held a crisis meeting at the Élysée attended by his foreign secretary Stéphane Séjourné, his former PM Édouard Philippe (now leader of a centrist party called Horizons) and the veteran François Bayrou, whose centrist MoDem party rallied to Macron’s cause in 2017.
During the meeting, Macron reportedly said that “we are the only useful vote to protect the French.” Macron has long styled himself as the “protector-in-chief” of the French: against the gilets jaunes hordes, against Covid, against Putin.
Perhaps it was a coincidence that the Macron-friendly broadcaster BFMTV warned on Monday that Covid is making a comeback. Something similar happened on the eve of the 2022 presidential election. The Gallic strain of the virus has an uncanny knack of returning as the French prepare to go to the polls.
There are other similarities between now and 2022. Two years ago, France’s artistic and sporting elite rallied to Macron’s side to warn the hoi polloi that anything other than a vote for the president would be a vote for fascism.
They’re at it again. From actors to social media influencers to sports stars such as Kylian Mbappé, all have been urging their compatriots to steer clear of the National Rally.
“I don’t want to represent a country that doesn’t correspond to our values,” said Mbappé, a footballer friend of Emmanuel Macron, and who has just signed for Real Madrid on an annual salary of €15 million ($16 million).
“He’s entitled to his opinion, but I don’t expect people I consider to be out of touch to come and lecture the French,” said Sébastien Chenu, the RN spokesman.
Jordan Bardella, the president of the RN, offered a similar riposte to twenty-eight-year-old “Squeezie” (aka Lucas Hauchard), the second most followed influencer in France, who last week told his 8.8 million followers that ‘the RN won’t help you.”
In response, Bardella mocked “multi-millionaires who answer to the very noble profession of influencer.” Rather than simply regurgitating the ideas of the far-left, continued Bardella, Squeezie should “respect” the millions of French who vote for the National Rally.
Marion Cotillard, the Oscar-winning actress posted a photo of herself online wearing a badge calling for the “young to screw the front Nazional.” Drawing a comparison between the National Rally — or the National Front as it was before the 2018 rebranding — and 1930s fascism is a time-honored tradition in France. But as last week’s European elections demonstrated, it is a tactic that no longer resonates outside the echo chamber of the cultural and political elite.
The antisemitism that characterized the early years of Jean-Marie Le Pen’s National Front has been eradicated. In twenty-first-century France, it is the far-left La France Insoumise [LFI] which frightens most Jews.
On the same weekend Marion Cotillard likened the National Rally to the Nazis, the eighty-eight-year-old historian and Nazi hunter Serge Klarsfeld (whose father was murdered at Auschwitz) appeared on French television. Asked if he preferred the National Rally or La France Insoumise, Klarsfeld said he would have “no hesitation” voting for the RN, ‘which supports Jews and the state of Israel.”
He added that the “National Rally has undergone a change,” whereas LFI is infected “with antisemitic overtones and violent anti-Zionism.”
Declarations such as Klarsfeld’s carry far more weight with the majority of the electorate than the vacuous virtue-signaling of actresses and influencers. They are regarded as rich, aloof and out of touch with most of the country. Not unlike their president.
This article was originally published on The Spectator’s UK website.
