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Emmanuel Macron may have appeared as relaxed as ever as he welcomed Keir Starmer to the Élysée Palace yesterday, but behind the scenes, a growing number of insiders are asking: Has France’s head of state gone mad, drunk on the imperial trappings of the presidency?
It’s a surprising question for the leader of one of the world’s largest economies, but it’s one that more and more people are asking.
Since Macron announced, shortly after his election in 2017, that he would be a “Jupiterian” president (in reference to the Roman emperor of the gods) and cancelled the traditional Bastille Day television interviews based on questions from journalists, serious people risk not doing justice to his “complex thinking”. They wonder whether he might be suffering from some kind of narcissistic personality disorder.
Speculation about Macron’s mental health has mounted since his disastrous decision to call a snap election two months ago and his failure to appoint a prime minister since then.
Macron’s former education minister, Jean-Michel Blancer, said this week in an interview with radio station France Inter: “There is a bit of masochism and a bit of madness” in Macron’s judgment.
Has French President Emmanuel Macron (pictured) gone mad, intoxicated by the imperial trappings of the presidency? asks Jonathan Miller.
Pascal Proud, chief political commentator for CNEWS, often described as France’s answer to right-wing US television network Fox News, said the president has been in “total denial” for months and that “not even his relatives can hide their fear of his deteriorating psychological health.”
Foreign commentators are also supporting the bill. The German political weekly Die Zeit recently put it very clearly: “Has Emmanuel Macron gone mad?”
He must be a man under almost unbearable pressure.
Far-left leader Jean-Luc Mélenchon, who is demanding that a member of his coalition take over as prime minister, has called on his supporters to take to the streets next week.
Meanwhile, police, who are expected to keep order during the protests, are on the verge of a mutiny after yet another gender-based murder, this one committed by a foreign criminal with ten previous convictions who has never spent a day in jail.
A synagogue in Montpellier was firebombed last weekend and Macron’s war on savage urban gangsters has proved singularly ineffective, according to a recent report by Europol, the European Union’s police agency, which says several European countries – including France – are suffering from murder, torture, kidnappings and unprecedented levels of drug-related violence, including intimidation.
During the first few weeks that France had no government, many made light of it, joking that perhaps the country would be better off without one. No one is laughing now.
French President Emmanuel Macron listens to British Prime Minister Keir Starmer before their meeting at the Elysee Palace in Paris.
It will be interesting to see what Keir Sturmer made of a furious Macron when he dropped by the Elysée yesterday for a ritual hug from the French president. 10 Advisers could not help but hail the encounter as the start of a new era in mature Franco-British relations.
But if the shrewd British prime minister believes he can restore relations with the EU by cooperating with its discredited political elite, then expect something else.
Starmer is Macron’s sixth British prime minister. He refused to make the slightest concession to David Cameron before the Brexit referendum, and then Theresa May, before pretending to be Boris Johnson’s best friend, ignored Liz Truss and promised the wise Sunock to stop the boats. And now he has seduced his Labour opponents.
Macron’s performative hug could well be followed by a stab in the back. Like all psychopaths of all times, he first seduces and then betrays.
