Three days after celebrating his first-round presidential victory in a high-end Parisian brasserie with aides and celebrity friends, Emmanuel Macron came down to earth with a bump far from the capital’s comfortable streets, reports the Financial Times.
Campaigning in his home town of Amiens, the independent centrist was greeted with whistles and burning tyres as he visited Whirlpool workers protesting about the relocation of their factory to Poland.
Mr Macron, who faces far-right leader Marine Le Pen in the run-off on May 7, had originally declined to visit the factory gate to avoid inflaming opinion.
It did not help when his opponent turned up earlier in the day hugging and taking selfies with emotional employees. The two episodes — celebration over champagne and oysters on the Left Bank and an uneasy encounter with disenchanted working-class France — have made for a faltering start to Mr Macron’s second round campaign, playing into his opponent’s narrative that he is a candidate of the elites who cannot engage with real people.
Mr Macron himself recognised the issue when he spoke later to supporters in Arras that sounded like a note to himself.
“Let’s be serious. I was happy, the French voters placed us ahead . . . We were nothing a year ago,” the centrist politician explained.
“But I looked at the results the following morning. I saw the FN results here. I grasped our responsibility.”
The heated 45 -minute discussion with Whirlpool workers — broadcast live by the candidate’s team — ended with a handshake.
But the tough encounter underlined the deep fracture running through French society that Mr Macron must confront in the next 10 days, and beyond if elected, between those that globalisation has helped to thrive and those it has left behind.