French President Emmanuel Macron's Fall From Grace, Explained

When centrist Emmanuel Macron trounced far-right candidate Marine Le Pen in France's presidential election, Europe was simultaneously relieved and excited by the possible emergence of a new and charismatic champion of the values of tolerance and openness.

Three short months later, Macron’s shine has dulled, his domestic popularity has plummeted, and critics are beginning to argue that the inexperience and inclinations of France’s new leader may be a bigger liability than they initially thought.

The youngest president in modern French history, Macron has made a series of missteps that have led the French army’s top general to quit, turned the public against his wife, angered students and advocates for the poor, and surprised those who hadn’t realized that Macron wouldn’t play nicely with the country’s boisterous and aggressive press corps. He’s been called too authoritarian in his instincts, and too elitist in his approach.

It’s the most rapid descent for a French president in recent memory. A new poll published by YouGov last week found Macron has a remarkably weak 36 percent approval rating — a massive slide for a man who won the presidency with 65 percent of the vote despite never having held elected office.

Those numbers are far lower than those his previous three predecessors enjoyed at the same point in their presidency, according to polling firm IFOP.

In other words, the leader Europe saw as the anti-Donald Trump is now about as popular in his own country as Trump is within the US. That’s not, to be generous, a comfortable place for a newly elected president to be.

French President Emmanuel Macron's Fall From Grace, Explained

Macron’s collapse has come quickly, but there wasn’t a single event that has brought him low. It’s instead been a long series of gaffes that began with a public scuffle with the army and has now spread to Macron’s own marriage.

Macron royally angered the man in charge of the French army.
During his bid for the presidency, Macron promised to increase defense spending. Gen. Pierre de Villiers, the head of the French armed forces since 2014, partly agreed to stay in his job with that promise in mind.

Once in office, Macron soon realized that pledge was impossible to keep. That’s because he had also vowed to meet the European Union’s requirement to keep the national budget deficit from exceeding 3 percent of the country’s GDP. To do that, Macron decided the military would have to take a $980 million hit. In the ensuing, very public, scuffle, De Villiers resigned.

“If something puts the chief of the armed forces at odds with the president of the republic, the chief of the armed forces changes,” Macron told the Journal du Dimanche.

De Villiers, it seems, had complained about the cuts in a closed-door parliamentary meeting — and in a social media post. But Macron’s comments were seen as unseemly swagger.
In the traditional public address to the military, made on Bastille Day, Macron mentioned his annoyance at those who questioned his military choices. De Villiers then, too, aired his grievances.

“In the current circumstances I see myself as no longer able to guarantee the robust defense force I believe is necessary to guarantee the protection of France and the French people, today and tomorrow, and to sustain the aims of our country,” de Villiers said in a statement on July 19.

Arguments between the military and the Élysée Palace don’t often play out in public. This one did — and the entire affair led to sharp criticism of Macron from retired military officers. It wasn’t just that Macron decided to cut the budget — he also publicly criticized De Villiers.

"It's clear today that the executive cannot bear a situation where its top public servants have a view of things that is different from the political view put together by the Élysée," retired French Gen. Vincent Desportes told Reuters.

"It's not Erdoganism, but it's not far off," Desportes said in the same interview, in a reference to Turkey’s authoritarian leader, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan.

Ouch.

It wasn’t the first time Macron had been accused of imperious behavior. In late June he decided he would be the first president since the 1970s to eschew a traditional Bastille Day press conference.

A source close to Macron told Le Monde that “[Macron’s] 'complex thought process' lends itself badly to the game of question-and-answer with journalists." That didn’t go over well. French President Emmanuel Macron's Fall From Grace, Explained.