How Brigitte Macron is remaking Emmanuel into an alpha male

As Emmanuel Macron approaches the end of the second year since his re-election, his presidency seems to have become a cosplay. Out is Macron the policy wonk, mansplaining interminably. In is Macron the action man. 

What might be behind this remarkable transformation? Brigitte, say the Elysée-ologists. President Macron’s wife, his high-school drama teacher, twenty-four years his senior, appears to be the winner in a palace power struggle and Macron 2.0 is the result.

It’s been rough for Macron since he lost his majority in the National Assembly in 2022. His relationship with the German chancellor has descended into mutual loathing. He’s tottering on the edge of humiliation to the Rassemblement National (National Rally) in June’s European elections. In the polls he’s even less popular than Rishi Sunak and only marginally more liked than Olaf Scholz.

Macron’s response, influenced by Brigitte, wife turned Elysée power player, has been metamorphosis. The irritating know-it-all, the uber-technocrat, unable to stop talking, is suddenly channeling Sylvester Stallone’s Rocky Balboa.

In recent days the new Macron has been omnipresent. He showed up in Marseille last week to personally launch a massive police operation against drug gangs. Never mind if the gangsters are not ultimately defeated, it was the politics of spectacle, the image of the president on the front line, almost American in its naked mediatization, akin to the president of the United States visiting the Mexican border.

This was then followed by the release of extraordinary photographs of Macron in a black T-shirt and bulging biceps attacking a punch bag in a gym, posted to Instagram by his official photographer, Soazig de la Moissonnière. The semiologists are having a field day. Boxing enthusiasts noted that he didn’t have much of a jab, but this technical detail was irrelevant to the message that Macron is a hard man.

Then of course there is the president’s tough talk about French and European intervention in Ukraine — a Damascene conversion for the politician who has previously humiliated himself trying to appease Putin. True, French troops are probably unlikely to be deployed in Ukraine. But never mind the credibility of the threat, feel the symbolism.

Even the president’s many foes have to admit that he’s fit. Macron, still only forty-six, looks like he could deliver a formidable upper cut to Vladimir, if they were to take it outside. (Vladimir was of course the pioneer in macho imagery, having himself pictured shirtless on a horse, and tossing opponents on the judo mat. Although he has recently been pasty-faced and trembling.)

Are we now to see Macron without a shirt? His latest boast is that he would swim in the Seine himself to prove that the water is clean enough to be used by athletes in the forthcoming Olympics. A Macron version of Mao swimming the Yangtze.

And there are all the other symbols of the new Macron, including the introduction of school uniforms — a big win for Brigitte — and obligatory national service for teenagers, to inculcate republican values.

Macron’s presidency is not just more macho but is verging away from the center and towards the right, which is both politically astute and also not coincidentally the position of Mme. Macron.

A delicious gossipy story in Le Monde last week reveals from the Elysée that the “Madame Wing” of Brigitte Macron and her entourage are increasingly influencing the president. They have overcome centrist advisors to push the presidency to undercut the appeal to France’s increasingly conservative voters of the Rassemblement National of Marine Le Pen and her attractive protégé Jordan Bardella.

If Brigitte is Lady Macbeth, then her own Svengali (to mix literary allusions) is Bruno Roger-Petit, a former television anchorman and columnist for the business magazine Challenges. He has set up his office in the East Wing of the Elysée in the former sacristy, adjacent to the chapel built under Napoleon III, which Charles de Gaulle’s wife Yvonne used to frequent assiduously, Le Monde reveals. 

The other great influence on Brigitte is the new prime minister, Gabriel Attal, who phones her often, and embraces her ideas “without taking much convincing.” Attal, a strikingly handsome, gay thirty-five-year-old whose suits and hair are both beautifully cut, is Macron’s Mini-Me and a former socialist who harbors ambitions to succeed Macron in 2027. “Former” is the operative word since Attal has realized that sticking in the left lane won’t get him the top job as voters lean ever more strongly to the right. 

Can the influence of Brigitte rescue a presidency that’s been looking bogged down? She seems like a positive influence. Parisian friends of mine say she’s underestimated, very nice and unlike her husband, doesn’t talk all the time.

She’s affected by the nasty stories that circulate about the origins of this marriage and because she is obviously more shopworn than her younger husband, is particularly sensitive about cruel jests and the bizarre rumors that circulate about her, most recently the absurd claim by Candace Owens that Brigitte is actually a man. The first lady of France has become a bit like the Princess of Wales, attracting vile and ridiculous gossip.

In Le Monde, historian Camille Pascal, a former advisor to Sarkozy, said that under the Fifth Republic, “the Madame Wing is always more powerful when presidential power weakens,” becoming a sort of “last trench, a recourse.”

So who’s in charge? It’s an odd couple in the Elysée and the Elysée is a curious institution, a macedoine of power struggles and plotting. For the moment at least, it seems that Brigitte has the upper hand. 

This article was originally published on The Spectator’s UK website.