A traditional song shortly after his speech… Emmanuel Macron was filmed on Monday night singing in the middle of the street with passers-by, a surreal scene as the French president tries to overcome the crisis linked to his reform pension and hurts his popularity.
The problem; The video was posted by an organization that, according to Liberation newspaper, has links to the far right. Macron’s environment, however, assures that the president did not know the passers-by who invited him to sing with them.
According to Le Point, Macron was walking in the evening with his wife, Brigitte, on rue Notre-Dame-des-Shames in the 6th arrondissement of Paris, which is about three kilometers from the presidential palace. Then he met a group who invited him to sing with them, as one of the “choristers” told Valeurs actuelles.
The scene was so unreal that many netizens thought it was staged or a deepfake.
Macron, after previously defending his controversial reform, found himself singing Edmond Duplan’s Le Refuge, a traditional Pyrenean song he “knows and likes”, sources said.
“He couldn’t have known at the time the past of every person he was talking to,” the same source insisted.
A first video was posted shortly after midnight on the Projet Canto Facebook page which is the showcase of an organization and an app of the same name. The video is accompanied by the caption: “Only the mafia and Projet Canto can blackmail a president.” This organization describes itself as a protector of cultural heritage, which preserves traditional songs by digitizing them. However, an investigation by Liberation newspaper in 2022 said that it was founded and run by far-right extremists and that its app contains, among other things, nationalist songs or others associated with the Third Reich.
“The political song is part of the history of song and for that reason it is registered. Some are connected to the extreme right, others to the extreme left (…) Our choice is simply to register all popular songs”, the organization had responded at the time.
Another video showing the beginning of the scene was released today by a journalist from Valeurs actuelles. Passers-by shout at Macron and one asks them: “Do you want to sing with us?” The image is interrupted, then Macron is shown asking: “how do you know this song?” and another suggests they sing Le Refuge together. “Come on, let’s take a turn of Refuge,” replies the president, who had already sung it on a visit to the Hautes-Pyrénées in 2022.
