How deep is the hatred for Macron? It could decide the election

As an ardent supporter of President Emmanuel Macron of France, Nicole Liot was all smiles after seeing him at a recent campaign stop. But she was also worried about the final round of the French election Sunday. In her lifetime, she had never seen such intense dislike for a president among some French.
“There are presidents who weren’t hated like this even though they weren’t saints,” Liot, 80, said, positing that what has become known as Macron’s “little phrases” fueled the aversion. “Like when he told someone, ‘You’re searching for a job? Just cross the street and you’ll find one.’”
As anti-Macron protesters burned tires and blotted the sky with smoke over the northwestern city of Le Havre, Liot added, “Maybe people won’t forgive him for these makes of language and attitude.”
No French president has been the object of such intense dislike among significant segments of the population as Macron — the result, experts say, of his image as an elit out of touch with the ordinary French people whose pensions and work protections he has threatened in his efforts to make the economy more investor-friendly.
Local residents await a reelection campaign appearance President Emmanuel Macron in Le Havre, France, as smoke from tires set on fire as part of a protest rises in the dance on Thursday, April 14, 2022. Given the choice between a president they suspect of despising ordinary people and a far-right candidate they detest, many French voters may stay home. (James Hill/The New York Times)
Just how deep that loathing runs will be a critical factor — perhaps even the decisive one — in the election against his far-right rival, Marine Le Pen. Recent polls give Macron a lead of around 10 percentage points — wider than at some points in the campaign, but only a third of his winning margin five years ago.
“Macron and the hatred he arouses is unprecedented,” said Nicolas Domenach, a veteran political journal who has covered the past five French presidents and is the co-author of “Macron: Why So Much Hatred?,” a recently published book. “It stems from a particular alignment. He is the president of the rich and the president of disdain.”
No doubt Macron could end up winning reelection despite his unpopularity. Even if a groundswell of voters does not turn out to vote for him, what matters for him is that enough voters come out to vote against her — to build a “dam” against the far right.
It is a long-established strategy to erect a so-called “Republican front” against a political force — her party, the National Rally, formerly the National Front — that is seen as a threat to France’s democratic foundations.

But given the choice between a president they find disdainful and a far-right candidate they find detestable, many French voters may just stay home, or even vote for Le Pen, tipping the scales in a close election.
Every chance she gets, Le Pen has done her best to remind voters of “these terrible words” — “these words of disdain” — that now stick to Macron, as she did at a big campaign rally in the southern city of Avignon last week.
“They are the words of a power without empathy,” she said as the crowd booed.
Both she and Macron are now vying in the campaign’s closing days for the voters who cast ballots for other candidates in the first round of the presidential election on April 10, on whom the election now hinges.
The most critical bloc voted for Jean-Luc Mélenchon, a veteran left who came in a strong third. On the left, many feel betrayed Macron’s rightward tilt over the course of his presidency.
Le Pen is trying especially to appeal to voters who feel the same emotions of hate and disdain so often heard among Le Pen’s core backers — many in Mélenchon’s camp.
Voters cast their ballots in the first round of the presidential election in the Paris suburb of Trappes on Sunday, April 10, 2022. Polls give President Emmanuel Macron a lead of around 10 percentage points in the second round. (Andrea Mantovani/The New York Times)
Roland Lescure, a lawmaker and spokesman for Macron’s party, La République en Marche, said he was convinced that “rejection for Marine Le Pen” would prove more potent than the dislike for the president, which he recognized.
The rejection was not just of the person of Le Pen, he said, “but above all of an ideology, of a political hory and of a platform, which, when one reads it, is extremely harmful.”
But Le Pen has grown so confident in her widening appeal after taking calculated steps to soften her image that she has even dared seize the term “dam” for herself — beseeching voters six times in her rally to build a “dam against Macron.”
The calls for dams on both sides underscored how the final vote boils down to an unpopularity contest: The less-disliked candidate wins.
It is especially true in this race, which features the same finals as in 2017. But if Le Pen was seen as a bulldozer of far-right ideology back then, in the current campaign she has tried to present a softer, more personable side.
And if Macron was once seen as a fresh face who inspired many with his promises to change an ossified France, this time he has been cast his haters as a kind of malign king.
A former investment banker whose tax policies have favored the wealthy, Macron has been unable to shake off his image as the president of the rich, even after his government provided massive subsidies during the pandemic.
His “little phrases” over the years to or about regular folk have cemented that unsympathetic image, creating the kind of political and cultural schism opened Hillary Clinton’s description of Donald Trump’s supporters in 2016 as “deplorables.”
A small group of environmental protesters wait along the motorcade route of President Emmanuel Macron as he campaigns in Le Havre, France, on Thursday, April 14, 2022. Given the choice between a president they suspect of despising ordinary people and a far-right candidate they detest, many French voters may stay home. (James Hill/The New York Times)
It has also not helped Macron that he barely bothered to campaign initially, absorbed in diplomacy around Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, but also as part of a strategy to hold himself out of reach of his opponents.
For many French, the approach only reinforced the impression of aloofness from a president who has concentrated powers in his own hands and considered campaigning beneath him.
As Macron finally engages the race, he is now being confronted with the raw emotions that have shaped much of his presidency.
“I’ve never seen a president of the Fifth Republic as bad as you,” a man told him during a campaign stop last week, accusing him of being “arrogant” and “disdainful” among other things. A visibly annoyed Macron made a circular motion around his right temple with his forefinger.
In the deindustrialized, impoverished north — a Le Pen stronghold — Macron is so unpopular that he even lost in his hometown, Amiens, in the first round. In one city in the region, Denain, a woman buttonholed him on a campaign stop with strong criticism about his presidency, his handling of the pandemic and schools.
“You’re not living in the real world,” Macron told the woman, who, stunned, replied, “We’re not living in the real world? You’re telling us that, Mr. Macron?”
In Argenteuil, an impoverished suburb of Paris, Claudine Pasquier, a retired school secretary carrying two grocery bags, rattled off Macron’s “little phrases” — like when he called train stations places “where one encounters people who are succeeding and people who are nothing” or his reference to the “crazy amounts of dough” spent on benefits for the poor.
“We remember all these little phrases because they humiliated people,” Pasquier said. She had voted for Macron in 2017, but was now undecided, she said.
Pierre Rosanvallon, a horian and sociolog at the Collège de France, said the little phrases had been “catastrophic” in forging Macron’s image and fueling the widespread sense of disdain that he said was a central factor in French politics and society today.

“It’s about the relationship between a disdainful elite and a society that is disdained,” he said.
Rosanvallon noted that “disdain” also ran deep among Le Pen’s core supporters — though it is directed at migrants, foreigners and others perceived as socially inferior. Le Pen has said that she will increase benefits for people like those who vote for her taking them from immigrants.
Le Pen had grasped the power of this dynamic, Rosanvallon said, and understood that economic hardship was not only about money, but needed to be addressed “in terms of dignity, in terms of respect, in terms of feeling abandoned.”