Macron at a press conference: forced return to fundamentals? – The HuffPost

via Associated Press

POLITICS – This was necessary for the Head of State to lend himself to a new press conference. His second, only, in four years. Emmanuel Macron invites several hundred journalists to the Elysée, this Thursday, December 9, in the village hall of the Château, a few weeks away from assuming the rotating presidency of the Council of the European Union. Or the PFUE, according to the acronym.

The goal of this exceptional meeting, in the first sense of the term: to talk about the Old Continent, therefore, and the French strategy from January 1, when Emmanuel Macron will take on this new cap.

A question-and-answer game organized by the presidency within five months of the supreme election. It is difficult, in this context, to imagine journalists not seizing this rare opportunity to question the Head of State on health or political issues, on his own candidacy or those of the far right.

And for good reason, Emmanuel Macron has not really multiplied this kind of shooting window over the course of his five-year term. The last major press conference date of the month of april 2019. The Head of State then reported on the conclusions of his great national debate. Since? Nothing. Or almost. He did have the interviews given here and there, the few minutes allowed during international meetings, but nothing allowed journalists to question the Head of State at length.

Before him, Nicolas Sarkozy – who had tumultuous relations with the media – had for example convened four press conferences in five years in office. And what about the six exercises carried out by François Hollande?

Unlike the socialist, Emmanuel Macron quickly undertook to rarefy his word. One way to give it weight. “I will not make journalists my confessors, I will not make them visit the backstage or the kitchens”, he explained to regional press from the in-between rounds in 2017, after opposing his predecessor’s conception of power. “François Hollande does not believe in the ‘President of Jupiter’. He considers that the president has become a transmitter like any other in the political-media sphere. For my part, I do not believe in the ‘normal’ president ”, he said to Challenges at the end of 2016.

Jupiter, the press and the distance

Result: a relationship peppered with tensions, a project, aborted, to move the press room out of the Elysee Palace and a mess of misunderstandings.

“He thought that the media on a political and economic line similar to his own, would in fact be favorable to him”, analyzes the historian Alexis Lévrier in his book Jupiter and Mercury. Presidential power facing the press, (Little Mornings) And that these links with certain press bosses would help him. ” Missed.

It is undoubtedly with the Alexandre Benalla affair that the mistrust between the President of the Republic and the journalists reached its paroxysm. Exasperated by the revelations around his very close representative, the Head of State did not hesitate to attack “the press”, which, according to him, “no longer seeks the truth.”

“I see a media power which wants to become a judicial power, which decided that there was no longer any presumption of innocence in the Republic and that it was necessary to trample on a man and with him the whole Republic”, he launched in July 2018, without holding back his blows, during a reception organized at the Elysee Palace in honor of parliamentarians. A sequence full of resentments which will have lastingly marked the relationship with journalists.

Just like his initial refusal to participate in the traditional interview of July 14, because his “complex thinking” did not lend itself to it, in the words of those around him. It is finally in the summer of 2020, after a year marked by the first waves of the covid-19 epidemic that he will resume exercise.

An unprecedented health crisis which will also have accentuated the will of the Head of State to control his expression. Emmanuel Macron will have delivered nine more or less long speeches on the subject, without the slightest contradiction. As for press conferences, they remained the prerogative of his ministers. Not easy for Jupiter to come down from the ether.