By running for a second term, Emmanuel Macron took with him in his decision his wife Brigitte Macron. Fusional and indispensable ally of the President of the Republic, she accepted with honors the choice of her husband, drawing a positive balance sheet from his experience while admitting the difficult points. This is what appears from his interview with Agence France Presse, a little over a week before the second round of presidential elections where the leader of La République en Marche will face the head of the National Rally, Marine Le Pen. She will continue to advise him, while leaving him totally free to choose. “We talk a lot about everything, but in the context of the presidential election, in no way do I try to influence him. Never. Because it’s the story between the French and a man“, she explained on TF1 in December.
Contrary to what some had predicted for her when she became first lady, Brigitte Macron claims not to have lived “hell” at the Elysee Palace in 2017, when Emmanuel Macron won. It takes more to scare the former literature teacher who married the politician in 2007. At 69, the first lady is ready for a new adventure if the French men and women want it, accepting the constraints that go with it.
During this five-year mandate during which she was able to impose her mark, Brigitte Macron was able to offer all her energy and passion to help hospitals, people with disabilities and children. It is for the latter that she would like more than anything to continue to fight, inhabited by her fiber as a teacher. “If I stay, I would like to do more to fight against school bullying and the addiction of young people to screens“, which “immense damage“in society,” she says.
Shadow and light
Being present, in the shadows, sometimes in the light, to defend the most serious issues such as the fate of children with cancer in Ukraine, the one who has received no less than 100,000 letters in five years is involved in the fields or “she feels comfortable” without doing politics. This is how she succeeded Bernadette Chirac as president of the Fondation des Hôpitaux de Paris-Hôpitaux de France, which manages the popular “Yellow Pieces” operation or launched in 2019, with the support of the LVMH group – which lends him a number of representation dresses – the Institute of Vocations for Employment (Live), which trains adults aged 25 to 30 without training or employment.
Missions that she carried out with that of first lady classic who accompanies her husband, to the Elysée or elsewhere, for the obligations of representations of the State. She also showed a certain sense of worldliness, using it for noble causes. Friend of Carla Bruni-Sarkozy, Stéphane Bern, Bernard Montiel or Line Renaud, she is gifted with great interpersonal skills, without being an ingenue. She warns her husband against courtiers as soon as she becomes suspicious. “I tell him when I don’t feel someone, when it worries me, she confides. At one point it was shoe polish all the time. But there are fewer court games than at the beginning. They felt it didn’t work with us“, explains the first lady.
Touched by violence, but solid as a rock
Mother of three children from her first marriage with André-Louis Auzière, Laurence, Sébastien and Tiphaine – the most involved in politics – Brigitte Macron, however, had to face the worst smear campaign, such as the one claiming that she was a man. In February, it launched a criminal action against its authors. The yellow vests crisis also affected it a lot, because it divided the French people and led to violent acts. “I fear violence, I fear hatred, I also fear this kind of permanent crescendo. We go further and further“, she lamented on TF1 in December. Broken in the exercise of first lady, Brigitte Macron is ready, solid as a rock but human above all, to re-enlist for a new five-year term, with the personal sacrifices that it costs.