Jonathan Miller Jonathan Miller

Tiphaine Auzière and the panic inside the Élysée

Tiphaine Auzière (Photo: Getty)

Will the presidency of Emmanuel Macron open the door to a political dynasty in France? He has no children, so that’s a problem. But wait. There’s Brigitte Macron, who has three. Albeit, all from the union she abandoned to marry Emmanuel, her pupil.

Meet the youngest of Mme Macron’s three children, Tiphaine Auzière, 36, a lawyer, social entrepreneur, and République En Marche activist. Merely six years younger than Macron himself, Tiphaine is the striking cover girl (alongside her mum, the First Lady of France) of Paris Match magazine this week. And it doesn’t take profound insight to imagine that with important regional elections next year, she’s running for something.

At this stage of the French electoral cycle, speculations are febrile, which is why the hagiographic treatment of Tiphaine by Paris Match has excited the inside-the-périphérique media. In the magazine, Tiphaine enjoys the most flattering presentation imaginable. She is pictured wafting through a paddock in the North of France, surrounded by her dogs and horses (she’s a passionate show jumper), wearing a very short, very well cut white floral dress in which she has evidently not been mucking out her stables.

Tiphaine lives outside Calais where she is known for local activism, but her latest initiative is a notably higher profile bid to open a private school to teach deprived children. This is notably ‘outside of a contract’ with the state, hence defiantly outside of the centralised French education system that so often fails these children.

The bold headline declares her ‘L’effrontée’ – which carries a variety of translations, including the impudent, the insolent and the cheeky one.

Does she seek permission from the president, her stepfather, before launching her initiatives? ‘I act and inform afterwards. If not, nothing would get done,’ she says.

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