look back at Emmanuel Macron’s controversial sentences in 2023

The President of the Republic has made a habit of provoking debate through the choice of his words and expressions, even if it means arousing the indignation of the opposition. The year 2023 was no exception.

“There are little sentences that I fully accept”explained Emmanuel Macron last April to readers of Parisian. The head of state is used to making shocking statements that provoke controversies. “Factious”, “decivilization”the president continued his strategy in 2023. A look back at these little sentences which sparked controversy.

“Who could have predicted the climate crisis?”

Emmanuel Macron started the year with a controversy on the climate issue. “Who could have predicted (…) the climate crisis with spectacular effects again this summer in our country?”launched the Head of State during his televised wishes for 2023, provoking the anger of environmental activists and scientists.

Experts then point out that the first IPCC report dates from 1990, without taking into account the previous work of numerous researchers such as the vulcanologist Haroun Tazieff. “Hello Jupiter, this is Earth: it’s 22°C at 10 p.m. on January 1st”, comments, laconic, the climatologist Christophe Cassou. Two weeks later, Emmanuel Macron explains his formulation, ensuring that he was “misunderstood” and wanted to deliver “an ecological warning message”. The head of state also ended the year with an article published in The world to remind us that the objective of getting away from fossil fuels was “non-negotiable”.

“The factious and the factions”

“We cannot accept either the factious or the factions”he declared on March 22 to the news of TF1 and France 2 in full mobilization against the pension reform, terms that he already used during the “yellow vest” crisis. “Contempt”, “arrogance”, “denial” : several left-wing politicians then took exception to this expression, seeing in it a comparison between peaceful demonstrators and the rioters of the American Capitol and Brazil.

In mid-April, a few days after the promulgation of the law, the president returned to the field after months of crisis. He is welcomed to the sound of pots and pans in Alsace. “I don’t think they’re trying to talk, they’re trying to make noise. (…) It’s not pans that will move France forward”he said in front of journalists. “Eggs and pots are for cooking at home”he added the next day in Hérault.

“A process of decivilization”

Emmanuel Macron deplored, on May 24, in the Council of Ministers, “a process of decivilization” of French society in the face of the increase in attacks against elected officials and public officials. Did he borrow the polemical term from far-right ideology? Yes, accuse the left which cries of exploitation. No, retorts the executive, which denies any political move.

“We must work to recivilize”, reiterated the president on August 23 after the riots at the beginning of the summer. While emphasizing that “90%” of the perpetrators of the rioters were born in France, he invokes “a problem of integration and rebuilding of the Nation”. At the end of June, at the heart of the violence, another sentence from the head of state caused controversy: “We have the feeling that some [émeutiers] live on the street the video games that poisoned them.”

“Take a tour of the Old Port to find work”

“I’m going around the Old Port this evening with you, I’m sure there are 10 job offers”, assured Emmanuel Macron to the mother of a job seeker, on June 26, in Marseille. A sentence which recalls, five years ago, his famous one: “All you have to do is cross the street” to find work, launched to a young unemployed horticulturist.

The president accepts and had already bowed to this sentence during a trip to Dunkirk last May: “A few years ago, it got me into a lot of trouble, I said that you just had to cross the street, there you have to walk a meter.” After these new little sentences, the left once again stepped up to the plate, denouncing the “contempt for the people of the head of state.

Gérard Depardieu “makes France proud”

He “makes France proud”, declared the president on December 20 on the set of C à vous on France 5, saying he was a “great admirer” of the actor, targeted by two complaints for rape and sexual assault, and indicted in one of the two case. And to denounce a “manhunt” after the broadcast of the issue of “Complement of investigation” on Gérard Depardieu. The head of state aroused the anger of feminist associations and triggered an internal war in French cinema.

Invoking “the presumption of innocence”, he disowned his Minister of Culture. Rima Abdul Malak had estimated that the actor’s comments reported in “Additional investigation” made “shame on France”. She announced that a “disciplinary procedure” would be initiated by the Grand Chancellery of the Legion of Honor against him. “There are sometimes outbursts over comments made”the Legion of Honour “is not here to preach”tackles the president.