Imagine a 12 hour meeting. It’s long. Very long. Well for twelve hours, Emmanuel Macron held the big arms of current French politics in suspense in Saint-Denis on Wednesday. Until three o’clock in the morning, they discussed the war in Ukraine, the international situation, institutions, “cohesion of the Nation” and other subjects that could lead to joint work. But working twelve hours and at night for an interview behind closed doors, isn’t that a bit much? Manuel Bompard (LFI), present at this meeting, found him “quite grotesque” to “spend 12 hours to have no serious answer, no measure, no concrete announcement”. For his part, Julien Bayou (EELV), “who did not have this ”chance”” to dialogue for long hours with the president, confirmed to 20 minutes the unfortunate tendency of the President to “work a lot and late for nothing”. For him, Emmanuel Macron “furnishes […] to ”save time” and make us waste it”.
And it’s true that Emmanuel Macron has a history with endless meetings. In 2017, at the start of his first term, he was already boasting of this habit: “I think I do the longest and most collegial councils of ministers in the Fifth Republic. I want everything to be debated”, he said. In 2019, as France emerged from the Yellow Vests crisis, Emmanuel Macron organized the “great national debate” with exchanges that could last more than eight hours. So simple love of speech or political tactic?
An attachment to speech
Without an ounce of hesitation, Alexandre Eyries, HDR teacher-researcher in information and communication sciences at the Catholic University of the West in Niort confirms to 20 minutes that “Emmanuel Macron is a real speaker”. “One can speak in him of a true ministry of the Word. He has a very strong personal attachment to dialogue. »
In short, Emmanuel Macron likes to talk. But not only, according to Alexandre Eyries. “For Emmanuel Macron, the life of a democracy is to dialogue, debate and exchange, even if it means not necessarily finding an agreement. But in any case, the interest lies there, in the word,” he says. “Yes, that, he likes to talk a lot,” confirms political communication expert Philippe Moreau Chevrolet, president of MCBG Conseil.
” It’s a war machine.”
For the latter, without a doubt, this habit of organizing very long interviews is also a political message. “He wants to create events and achieve performances each time he intervenes in public debate. But talks between presidents and party bosses are nothing extraordinary in the Fifth Republic.
No, what makes the very characteristic of its “performances” is the duration. During the night of Wednesday to Thursday, after the meeting of the leaders of the opposition and the president, a participant described to the World an Emmanuel Macron which “could have gone on until 6 a.m. It’s a war machine. “During these meetings, “it exhausts you,” adds Philippe Moreau Chevrolet. It must be said that according to relatives of the president, the president would be known to sleep little. As told in 2020 at European 1 his ex-pen Sylvain Fort, Emmanuel Macron has a “biological rhythm which, roughly, leads him to work until 1:30 a.m., 2 a.m., then to resume the collar around 6:30 a.m. to 7 a.m. »
The art of “hypnosis”
This mania for receiving people long and late is a formidable “weapon of communication without risk taking” according to Philippe Moreau Chevrolet. “He has a hypnotist side to Emmanuel Macron. Spending a lot of time with someone is also a way of domesticating them, of controlling them. So when he does it with his opponents, he wants to seduce, he wants to convince. It’s part of his strategy. It’s communication, it’s staging.
“He still has a pretty good role,” adds Alexandre Eyries. “He is there in the arena, in shirt sleeves… Of course there is a part of staging”, adds the researcher Alexandre Eyries, author of the book Political communication in debate: conflictuality, stigmatization, legitimization? published by Libertés Numériques.
The Macron Touch
For Philippe Moreau Chevrolet, this way of being will go down in history. “No one has ever done that”. Could it be the Macron Touch? In any case, “I had never seen such a way of functioning in a democratic model”, adds the president of MCBG Conseil.
And that questions him. “We went from a regime which was that of the scarcity of presidential speech to twelve-hour marathons. For what ? Maybe we need to come together as a country and we need those moments. Or, perhaps on the contrary, it is invasive and counterproductive. Is it a need for authority that one expresses and that he responds to? In the era of social networks, is this a sort of permanent continuity of image and speech? Is this his way of being a TikTok or Instagram president? One day we should ask ourselves about the meaning of this type of political performance. »