A question arises: who spoke during this trip? The candidate campaigning for re-election, or the incumbent president? Answer: both!
Impossible to distinguish these two faces, these two faces which give Emmanuel Macron a little Janus side. “President as much as I have to, and candidate whenever I can,” he explained yesterday. He himself had fun, pretending not to know sometimes if he answered as president or as a candidate. The staging reinforced the confusion: polite exchanges with a chosen audience, local elected officials, one would have thought a remake of the “great debate” that the Head of State had led three years ago to get out of the crisis. “yellow vests”. And the omnipresent context, of course, the war in Ukraine, the first subject on which Emmanuel Macron was questioned yesterday by his audience.
With the international situation, the organization of his campaign agenda is extremely complicated. But the war in Ukraine also allows Emmanuel Macron to carry out a stealth campaign, between two phone calls to Vladimir Putin or Joe Biden. Emergencies which also justify not falling into controversy with his opponents: moreover, the president confirmed it last night, he will not debate with them before the first round, not a single one of his outgoing predecessors will having done before him, he recalled…
And then this double hat has another advantage: that of linking one mandate to another. Example with the promise to abolish the TV license fee, presented as the logical continuation of the abolition of the housing tax implemented during the first five-year period. Same thing with the “resilience plan” that Jean Castex must unveil in a few days to limit the impact of the war in Ukraine on purchasing power: the opportunity for a small extension, a new inflation check, an extension the gas price freeze, a few weeks before the election…
The main risk that the candidate Macron runs is undoubtedly overconfidence, and the demobilization of his camp which would believe the victory acquired. Here too, even if the candidate took more risks, his main asset lies in his status as head of state.
The longer the war lasts and intensifies, the more it embarrasses its main adversaries Le Pen-Zemmour-Mélenchon, guilty of compromising with Russia. By threatening Europe, Vladimir Putin has well and truly become Emmanuel Macron’s best voice-beater.