The French president is now known for making it a habit to provoke debate through his choice of words and sentences, even if this sometimes causes outrage among the opposition. The year 2023 was no exception.
“There are small sentences I fully stand behind,” Emmanuel Macron explained to the readers of the newspaper Le Parisien in April 2023. The French head of state likes to use shocking expressions that trigger polemics. In particular, by using words like “factieux” or “décivilisation,” he continued this strategy in 2023 as well.
“Who could have predicted the climate crisis?”
Just a few hours before the turn of the year 2022/2023, Emmanuel Macron caused a polemic on the climate issue. “Who could have (…) predicted the climate crisis with its spectacular effects in our country this summer?” said the head of state during his New Year’s wishes for 2023 broadcast on television, provoking the anger of environmental activists and scientists.
Experts then remind that the first IPCC report dated back to 1990, without considering the earlier work of numerous researchers such as the volcanologist Haroun Tazieff. “Hello Jupiter, this is Earth: It is 22°C at 10 PM on January 1st,” comments the climatologist Christophe Cassou laconically. Two weeks later, Emmanuel Macron explained his wording and assured that he was “misunderstood” and wanted to convey “an ecological warning message.” By the way, the head of state ended the year 2022 with a contribution published in Le Monde, in which he reminded that the goal of phasing out fossil energies is “non-negotiable.”
“The facilitators and the factions”
“One cannot accept either the agitators or the splinter groups,” Macron said on March 22 in an interview on the channels TF1 and France 2, in the midst of the mobilization against the pension reform. Terms he had already used during the “Yellow Vests” crisis. “Contempt,” “arrogance,” “denial”: Several left-wing politicians were upset by this sentence and saw in it a comparison between peaceful demonstrators and the rioters at the American Capitol and in Brazil.
Mid-April, a few days after the passing of the pension reform law, the President traveled to the French provinces after months of crisis and was welcomed in Alsace with a concert of cooking pots. “I don’t think they want to talk, they want to make noise (…) But it is not pots that will move France forward,” Macron responded to journalists. The next day he added in the Hérault department: “The eggs and pans are there to cook food at my home.”
“A process of decivilization”
On May 24th, Emmanuel Macron lamented in the Council of Ministers “a process of decivilization” of French society in light of increasing attacks on elected representatives and public servants. Did he borrow the polemical term from far-right ideology? Yes, the Left accuses him of this, speaking of manipulation. No, the executive replies, denying any such political maneuver.
“We must set about re-civilizing,” the President repeated on August 23rd after the unrest in early summer. He did emphasize that “90%” of the rioters were born in France, but referred to “a problem of integration and the re-founding of the nation.” At the end of June, at the peak of the violence, another statement from the head of state caused controversy: “It feels like some rioters on the street are living out the video games with which they have poisoned themselves.”
“I will take a walk through the Old Port with you tonight, I am sure there are ten job offers there”, Emmanuel Macron assured the mother of a job seeker on June 26 in Marseille. This sentence recalls his famous “Il n’y a qu’à traverser la rue” (you just have to cross the street), which he had thrown at a young unemployed gardener five years earlier, “to find work”.
The President had already referred to this phrase a few weeks earlier during a trip to Dunkirk: “A few years ago, that caused me a lot of trouble, I said it was enough to cross the street, now you have to take a meter.” After these new little statements, the Left went up in arms again and denounced the “contempt for the people” by the head of state.
Gérard Depardieu “makes France proud”, said the President on December 20 in the show C à vous on the channel France 5 and described himself as a “great admirer” of the actor, against whom two complaints for rape and sexual assault exist and who was even charged in one of the two cases. Emmanuel Macron denounced a “manhunt” after the broadcast of the program “Complément d’enquête” about the artist. In this way, the head of state provoked the anger of feminist organizations and further fueled conflicts and debates on this subject in the French film industry.
Invoking the “presumption of innocence,” Macron discredited his Minister of Culture. A few days earlier, Minister of Culture Rima Abdul Malak expressed the view that the statements made by the actor, as reported in “Complément d’enquête,” brought “shame upon France.” She announced that the Grand Chancellery of the Legion of Honour would initiate a “disciplinary procedure” against the actor. Macron said in this regard: The Legion of Honour is “not meant to give moral sermons.”