I am almost done!

Yes there are close to a dozen candidates to the election right now, with the following distribution: two centrists, four right to far right candidates, and five left wing to far left candidates, but I won’t do all of them.

First up is this guy:

Macron is the incumbent, and technically he is not of any major party, although he pilfered his votes largely from the MoDEM (centrist party) and the Républicains (conservatives).

There is not much history to explain here: Marcon is an UFO of politics.

There is one major thing here: Macron, prior to being elected in 2017, had never held an elected office. He is what we call in politics a “technocrat”–precisely the kind of people that the Yellow Jacket movement is fed up with, so it’s interesting that he was elected.

He’s got a couple of things going for him: he’s pro-start up and business, he’s a Millenial, a former investment banker, and, well, he is a white guy (some people find him attractive, that is not me). He was elected at 39, making him the youngest person to ever become French president in the history of the position (in case you are wondering, the second youngest president of France was Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte–future Napoleon III–and the third youngest was Valérie Giscard d’Estaing, the centrist elected president in 1974 and who then got booted after just one term (extremely rare), giving France this now forever cult video of him walking out after the single most awkward goodbye ever).

Macron’s main electoral target is currently one of the groups going the most to the polls: the young to middle-aged white-collar worker. Like Sarkozy, Macron is also fond of saying classist and offensive stuff like “it’s easy to find a job, just walk across the street” (to a person saying they were having difficulties finding a job in their sector), “you do things in the way they ought to be done if you want to do your revolution: you get a degree, learn to feed yourself, and then you can give lessons to others” (to a high schooler who’d just interrupted his speech by singing the International Workers anthem), “if you want to look serious, put on a suit.” (to factory workers striking against a new labor law). He believes that the French are reticent to change and stuck in the oats (not entirely untrue), and his solution is to confuse honesty with blunt condescension. In fact, he reminds me of a certain former provost I knew who once explained the inability of an administration to make important funding decisions more than two weeks ahead of the end of classes in May by saying uncertainty was part of real life, and people should get used to it instead of whining.

Back on track, sorry. Macron’s inability to read the room has resulted in some very funny moments, like when ge posed with two shirtless guys in the French Caribbean, one of whom was flipping the bird to the camera, or when he turned the Elysées Palace into an electro-techno-dance nightclub and posed with the performers (which is about as cringe as you can imagine, given he’s now old enough to be the father of older Gen Z kids).

He’s not aligned with any big parties, but that’s possible in France because the campaign finance system is very different than the US system: up to the campaign limit, the state finances campaigns. If they don’t reach 5%, they have to reimburse this amount, but reaching that limit was largely possible in the past, even for “fringe” parties. This means that pretty much every bank will loan candidates fairly high sum of money.

Now, I don’t want to diminish Macron’s career performance: he became deputy general secretary of the Presidency in 2012, only two years after meeting Hollande (the position is sort of a Deputy Chief of Staff position), then Minister of the Economy and the Finances. This is a remarkable feat, because although it sounds like a boring ministry, and not especially more important than the position of Prime Minister, or Justice Minister or Foreign Affairs Minister, it is one of only 5 positions in the government called “ministères régaliens”, i.e ministries formerly represented by the King’s authority and persona, and that concern the sovereignty of France: justice, army, police, the ability to coin money and levy tax–economy–, and diplomacy. Those correspond today to these 5 ministries: Defense and Military, Economy and Finances, Justice, Interior, and Foreign Affairs. Those are the most coveted position, and they are also, consequently, the positions that have traditionally been harder glass ceilings to break for sexual and racial minorities. The first female Justice Minister was Elisabeth Guigou in 1997 (under the Jospin socialist government), the first black person to become minister was Christiane Taubira in 2012 under the Hollande presidency (note: I am not saying first person of color, because there is an ethnicity issue here that is touchy: Rachida Dati technically became the first woman of color to hold that title in 2007, under Sarkozy, but while she is of Northern African descent, Dati does not define herself publicly as a woman of color, and refutes that label. She will, however, if gingerly, define herself as someone “issue de l’immigration”, someone issued from foreign-born parents, in her case Algeria and Morocco).

When he ran in 2017, Macron was a virtual unknown in politics. The Minister of Economy might be very prestigious in political terms, it’s also a position that is rarely under the limelight. The ministry of justice comes often with the Keeper of the Seal position (the title is a royal inheritance, this was the person tasked with keeping the royal seal before) and is very visible, the interior and forreign affairs are highly visible positions, but traditionally, people forget who is at the Economy, and Defense, pretty quickly after they are nominated.

After being elected he benefited from a high approval rate (over the 55% mark), which is quite remarkable because he was a minister under Hollande who had the lowest approval rate of a French president…Pretty much ever, I think (4%–I mean even at the height of the Watergate Richard Nixon still had a 24% approval rate, so you have got to be pretty committed to mediocrity to get that far down).

It did not stay that way long: a year after his election, Macron was down to 25%, although it’s now come back to around 45%. In 2017, Macron was a new, fresh-faced president, not from any major party. A year later, he was a standoffish guy who doesn’t know how to read a room. His prime minister was more popular than him (which is not a good look) for a little bit, which may have contributed to his dismissal/quitting later.

Macron’s strategy in 2022 is essentially to force a Le Pen run off again by alienating the left wing voters, denouncing a non existent “woke culture” in France, accusing activists of color of plotting to destroy the nation, and acting generally as if the Muslim immigration of France is a danger to the country and police officers have the right to beat the crap out of demonstrators. He’s steering the debate purposefully on this because the debate on the rise of poverty is one he’ll loose. By keeping the debate on Le Pen’s traditional grounds, he’s veering to the right, and eyeing the traditional right, but maybe also trying to prevent Le Pen from eating up his voter base. He’s also doing this a) because he was such a better debater than Le Pen in between the two rounds in 2017, and b) because he is hoping the prospect of a Le Pen presidency will force everyone to vote for him to save France from itself.

It’s a very risky calculus because 2022 is not 2017, but it’s likely to work, which is maybe why his poster is so terrible–he does not care. He’s used the war in Ukraine to eclipse the very real grow of an inequality gap in France, and he’s using it also to avoid campaigning because he’s not that popular right now, and images of Macron being booed might do more damage to him than anything else. I think he’s also over-confident and thinks it’s a won election.

Let’s summarize:

The thing he was going for: reassuring, warm, confident, honest, with everyone backing him, Nous tous=us all or to say it differently we are all in this together.

Where it fails:

The top of his head is cut off, his smile is smarmy (but trying to look modest, which is a look he stole from pal Sarkozy), the lack of a capitalized T to tous and the decision to put the two words on two different lines rather than one has the unwanted effect of saying Us against All by emphasizing the Us, and there isn’t a single person of color behind him.

As far as campaign posters go it’s not entirely terrible, it has good things…

Wait, no, it does not.

Fire your communication consultant (someone from McKinsey probably) now, Mr President. They are terrible.

That’s all.