The veteran journalists did not wear ties and they did not address him as “Mr. President”: two outrageous insults in a television interview this week that served to underscore a new chapter in Emmanuel Macron’s mercurial presidency, one defined by popular anger, reports The New York Times.
The total lack of deference and a barrage of hostile questions in the interview on Sunday evening have reverberated for days in France and come on top of a coolly savage portrayal of Mr. Macron in a new book of memoirs by his predecessor François Hollande.
What both Mr. Hollande’s book and the television interview had in common was not only the substance of their attacks — that Mr. Macron is a self-seeking servant of society’s fortunate — but also their underlying message: It is open season on the French president.
The undisguised hostility has made clear that, less than a year into this new presidency, anti-Macron sentiment is emerging as a potent force. It is being fueled by a pervasive sense that Mr. Macron is pushing too far, too fast in too many areas — nicking at the benefits of pensioners and low earners, giving dollops to the well-off and slashing sacred worker privileges.
The souring of the public mood is reflected in Mr. Macron’s drooping poll numbers among workers and the middle class. (His popularity remains high among those that the French call “executives.”) It is also seen in the streets, where a wave of strikes and demonstrations are testing Mr. Macron’s resolve as never before.
“In every area, there is discontent,” admonished one of Mr. Macron’s interviewers on Sunday, Edwy Plenel, a political journalist with the investigative news website Mediapart. The president could barely conceal his anger.
“Your question is biased!” Mr. Macron retorted. “The discontent of the railway workers has nothing to do with the discontent in the hospitals!”
The result for now is a strike that has crippled France’s vaunted rail service, shut down many of its universities and put hostile demonstrators in the streets as they try to push back against Mr. Macron’s effort to reshape the country’s work force culture.
The television interview was less a conversation than a controlled ambush. For more than two hours, Mr. Macron was admonished, lectured at, cut off and shouted over. And he gave nearly as good as he got. Still, never before has a French president been so rudely manhandled.
“France has passed a threshold with this debate,” the political consultant Philippe Moreau-Chevrolet said on television afterward.
“So, you are searching for cash in the wallets of the retirees! Excuse me, Emmanuel Macron!” the other television interviewer, Jean-Jacques Bourdin, nearly shouted at the president.
In the interview, it was plain “Emmanuel Macron” — as in Citizen Macron in the style of the French Revolution — from start to finish.
“I have got to put the country back to work,” Mr. Macron was left blustering. “There are too many who work hard, and don’t earn enough from their work.”
“You are not the teacher and we are not the students!” Mr. Plenel said in reprimand to Mr. Macron, using a phrase that has a long pedigree in French political debates.
“I’m not aggravated, but I don’t like intellectual dishonesty!” Mr. Macron insisted through gritted teeth.
The far-left leader Jean-Luc Mélenchon, who makes no secret of his disdain for Mr. Macron, seized upon Sunday’s televised “wrestling match,” as one commentator called it.
“Jupiter has fallen from the sky!” he declared, invoking the king of the gods, a name the French news media have pinned on Mr. Macron for gathering up extraordinary power for example by using his legislative supermajority to carry out his agenda almost unchecked.
If he has not quite fallen, at the very least there is a growing sense that Mr. Macron and the French presidency are no longer “sacred,” as a headline on Mr. Plenel’s news website Mediapart put it.
To be sure, Mr. Macron, once he had rebalanced himself, periodically launched his habitual command performance, speaking fluently and without notes on Syria, labor, taxes and other subjects for more than two hours.
Yet the image remaining is that of an aggravated French president, his voice fairly choking, having to remind his interlocutors, “You are the interviewers, and I am the president of the Republic!”
“I am not about sanctifying the function of the presidency,” Mr. Plenel said on television afterward.
“There is a monarchical culture in France,” Mr. Plenel, who was once editor in chief of Le Monde, said in an interview on Tuesday, explaining his strategy Sunday. “It was necessary to break the code of this monarchical culture.”