Is Macron having a Meloni makeover?

Emmanuel Macron never does anything by chance, so why did he allow himself to be filmed downing a beer in one on Saturday night? The clip, which has gone viral, has angered puritanical progressives. Green MP Sandrine Rousseau has branded Macron’s behaviour ‘toxic masculinity’. 

The president of the French Republic slaked his thirst just before midnight in the dressing room of the Toulouse rugby team in the Stade de France. Toulouse had beaten La Rochelle to win the French rugby championship, an event at which Macron had been introduced to the players before kick-off. He ducked out of a similar invitation in April at the final of the French football cup, worried that the heckling would shake the stadium’s rafters. Evidently, he decided to bet on the bonhomie of rugby supporters. 

There was a brief flurry of barracking when Macron emerged onto the pitch to shake hands with the two teams but it was more of the pantomime variety. Rugby in France is less bourgeois than it is in England but it is still a sport that embodies so-called conservative values: the values that Macron has been courting this year. 

There was a particularly effusive handshake for the captain of the Toulouse team, Antoine Dupont, the world’s best player, who threw his support behind Macron in last year’s presidential election. 

Though Macron won that battle, his party were hammered in the subsequent parliamentary elections and he has struggled to assert his authority since. In contrast, Marine Le Pen’s star continues to rise. 

At the weekend, France’s principal Sunday paper, le Journal de Dimanche, devoted its first eight pages to the leader of the National Rally (NR), examining the reasons for her popularity. Forty-two per cent of the electorate have voted for her or one of her MPs, up from 30 per cent in 2017. Asked why they had voted for the NR, 61 per cent of people said it was because the other parties had nothing to offer; of particular concern to Le Pen voters are immigration, law and order and a general feeling that the country is in decline. 

By decline, the people don’t just mean economically but also culturally; the sentiment that France’s history and traditions are under attack from the same progressive dogma that is causing so much division in America and Britain. 

In his salad days, Macron contributed to this feeling of insecurity, famously declaring in 2017 that there was no such thing ‘as French culture’. The following year he posed for a photograph that similarly enflamed the country’s conservatives. The occasion was the Fete de la Musique, a jamboree that is held annually on 21 June, and which Macron marked in 2018 by inviting a collection of rappers and DJs to the Elysee. The photo showed Macron surrounded by scantily-clad men and women, one of whom had made clear his opposition to immigration control. It was not what traditionalists expected of their president. 

Downing beer with rugby players, however, is far more to their taste, as is Macron’s recent penchant for visiting sites of historical and cultural significance; as a headline put it in le Figaro at the start of this month: ‘Macron, from the negation of French culture to the exaltation of eternal France.’

France is, in general, a socially conservative country, at least outside of Paris, but it’s taken Macron years to understand that; according to the press, it was Nicolas Sarkozy who helped him see the light. The former president was invited to the Elysee earlier this month and he told Macron: ‘When France leans to the right, one must choose a prime minister from the right.’

Macron made the mistake last May of nominating Elisabeth Borne as his PM. A dull socialist and a technocrat, Borne is an ardent environmentalist and opposed to any crackdown on illegal immigration; earlier this month she irritated Macron by linking Le Pen’s party to the wartime Vichy regime. ‘You won’t be able to make millions of French people who voted for the far right believe that they are fascists,’ he told her. 

At the end of April, Macron gave Borne 100 days to reinvigorate France after the social unrest provoked by the pension reform. She has failed to rise to the challenge, and the deadline expires on 14 July. That’s Bastille Day, when tradition dictates that presidents attend a pomp and ceremony military parade on the Champs Élysées. 

Might Macron mark the day by replacing Borne with a PM from the right? The media in France believe he will, and some outlets moot the possibility that the president is seeking an alliance with the centre-right Republicans. Centre-right MPs within Macron’s Renaissance party are encouraging the idea with one, Constance Le Grip, saying recently that Renaissance ‘has moved a little to the right, which wasn’t the case during the previous term of office’.  

Republican MPS and voters were broadly supportive of his pension reforms, as they were of his recent warning about environmental over-regulation. But if there is to be any official collaboration it will require Macron to agree to their hardline approach on immigration and asylum.  

The latest name to be suggested as a possible successor to Borne is Laurent Wauquiez, who led the Republicans between 2017 and 2019 before he was forced out by the centrists within his party; too right wing, they claimed, by which they meant he shared the concerns of his party’s grassroots about mass immigration and soaring crime. 

The centre-right’s refusal in recent years to address these issues has allowed Marine Le Pen to become mainstream. Despite her success at last year’s parliamentary elections, however, a large majority of the centrists and centre-right – 59 per cent – don’t want her to see her president, though they would prefer her to someone from the far left.  

What they want is someone like Italy’s Giorgia Meloni, pro-family, pro hard work and opposed to progressives, slackers and illegal immigrants. Meloni’s many detractors in the western media believes this makes her a ‘fascist’ or ‘hard right’, but in a less juvenile age it used to be known as conservatism. 

Meloni is in Paris on Tuesday for her first visit to France since becoming Italian PM last year. She’s been critical of Macron in the past but that was when he was going through his progressive phrase; she might find the 2023 version more to her liking.