Gavin Mortimer Gavin Mortimer

The chaos is closer to home than Macron thinks

Out and about in Paris on Saturday I passed scores of protestors on their way to the Champs-Élysées to vent their fury against Emmanuel Macron. Wearing their gilet jaunes (yellow vests), they were angry, determined and overwhelmingly white and middle-aged. The nationwide protest that pulled in nearly 300,000 demonstrators has been billed as a pushback against rising fuel tax but it goes much deeper than that; it’s the revolt of the people against a president they believe holds them in contempt. As one demonstrator told Le Figaro: ‘Macron is the president of the rich and not the poor. He should think also about the poor.’

Macron rarely thinks about the poor, except to insult them. In July 2017 he referred to them in a speech as ‘nothing’, the first of several barbs at those less fortunate than himself. That speech was at the opening of a start-up centre in Paris, where his audience was tecchies, hipsters and entrepreneurs – Macron’s kind of people.

A friend of mine, an Englishman, was present in Paris in May this year when the president spoke at the technology summit VivaTech, which bills itself as the ‘world’s rendezvous for start-ups’. He told me that Macron was greeted like a messiah, the audience overcome by a quasi-religious fervour.

Similar atmospheres were glimpsed during Macron’s campaign trail, one in particular in Paris in December 2016, which earned him much mockery on social media. But it did him no harm in the long run, although one should remember that France didn’t so much vote for Macron, as against Marine Le Pen.

There was a brief period before the second round of the presidential election when the leader of the National Rally had Macron on the back foot. Arriving unannounced in Amiens, Macron’s home city, Le Pen addressed the workers of an appliances plant threatened with closure because the bosses wanted to outsource to Poland.

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