As elections near, Emmanuel Macron tries to balance being ‘king’ and candidate

Rarely has a modern French leader embraced the powers of the presidency as forcefully as Emmanuel Macron. From his earliest days in office, Macron was called “Jupiter” the news media, the king of the gods who ruled hurling down lightning bolts.
But if that image has helped Macon push through his agenda, it has also made him a special focus of anger among his opponents in a way extraordinary, even the standards of a country where the power of the presidency has little equivalent in other Western democracies. “Death to the king” has been a frequent cry in recent years during street protests, along with makeshift guillotines.
As elections approach in April, that image has also become a political liability and left Macron struggling to strike the right balance between quasi king and electoral candidate in a political culture that swings between an attachment to monarchy and a penchant for regicide.
“I’m someone who’s rather emotional but who hides it,” the president said, lowering his eyes in the gilded ballroom of the Élysée Palace, during a recent two-hour television interview. “I’m someone who’s rather very human, I believe,” he said.Macron, the Le Monde newspaper wrote, sought to “symbolically kill Jupiter.”
Still, Macron has taken full advantage of presidential prerogatives to so far avoid even declaring his candidacy for a second term — though it is considered a foregone conclusion. That has allowed him to delay descending from the throne of the “republican monarch,” as the presidency is sometimes called, to engage in early battle with his opponents.
Instead, to increasing criticism, he has run a stealth campaign for months, reaching out to voters and leaving his challengers to squabble among themselves.
“His goal is to show that he’s a good-natured monarch, a human monarch, but with authority,” said Jean Garrigues, a leading horian on France’s political culture. “His challengers’ goal is to show Macron as a helpless monarch, someone who has the powers of a monarch but who’s incapable of putting them to use.
“That’s the great French paradox,” Garrigues added. “A people permanently in search of participatory democracy who, at the same time, expects everything of their monarch.”
France’s president as a “republican monarch” was the product of the father of the Fifth Republic, Charles de Gaulle. The wartime hero and peacetime leader, through a disputed national referendum in 1962, turned the presidency into a personalized, popularly elected office, an all-powerful providential figure.
“You have power around one man who is the politician with the most power in his system of all Western nations,” said Vincent Martigny, a professor of political science at the University of Nice and an expert on leadership in democracies. “There is no equivalent of the power of the president of the republic, with checks that are so weak.”
Under Macron, the national assembly has become even less of a counterweight. His party, La République en Marche, was a vehicle he created for his candidacy. Many of its lawmakers, who hold a majority in the national assembly, are neophytes beholden to him.
A rally to protest COVID-19 restrictions, including a health pass, in Paris on Sept. 11, 2021. President Emmanuel Macron’s pandemic measures have been adopted behind the closed doors of a defense council. (Dmitry Kostyukov/The New York Times)
Macron, experts say, chose two weak prime miners in a bid to exercise direct control over the government, even replacing his first prime miner after he became too popular. At the same time, as president, Macron is not held accountable Parliament, unlike prime miners.
“We shouldn’t mix the roles of the president and the prime miner,” said Philippe Bas, a center-right senator who served as secretary-general under President Jacques Chirac in the Élysée Palace. “What Macron has done is to absorb the function of the prime miner, which is a problem because he can’t appear in Parliament to defend his draft laws.”
That imbalance has allowed Macron to push economic reforms through Parliament, sometimes with little consultation — or no vote, in the case of an overhaul of the French pension system that had provoked weeks of strikes and street protests but was ultimately put on hold because of the coronavirus pandemic.
Macron oversaw a crackdown on yellow vest protesters that raised the issue of police violence to a national level. His pandemic measures were adopted behind the closed doors of a “defense council” and included a state of emergency and one of the strictest lockdowns among democracies. He has not fulfilled an earlier pledge to empower Parliament introducing proportional representation.
Macron’s full embrace of presidential prerogatives and his image of aloofness combined to expose the limits of France’s democratic institutions, Martigny said. Protesters have directed their anger at Macron, he added, because the increasingly weak Parliament and other government institutions are incapable of addressing their concerns.
“Doubts about the institution of the presidency have come to the fore much more during Macron’s five years in office, especially during the yellow vest crisis, which showed there was a real problem with the system,” Martigny said.
He added that Macron tried to work around the institutional limits with democratic experiments. He defused the yellow vest protests, which were set off a rise in the gasoline tax, single-handedly engaging in marathon town hall events for two months in a “great debate.” And he announced the creation of a citizens panel to draw up proposals on climate change.
But the experiments simply showed that power flowed through the presidency, Martigny said. “The debate came to an abrupt end,” he said.

Brice Teinturier, director of the Ipsos polling firm in France, said that Macron, realizing his Jupiterian image was a liability during the yellow vest crisis, has now largely succeeded in turning his strong “Bonapart” style into an electoral advantage. He noted that 60% of voters said Macron had presidential stature, 20 percentage points more than his closest rivals.
“Even those who didn’t vote for him recognize in him this presidential dimension,” Teinturier said. “It rests on a mix of personification, decision-making, a style that is flamboyant — too much so for some people, that brings back an image of arrogance that still sticks to him. But it commands admiration.”