A certain idea of France
For a president accustomed to negative headlines, the New York speech was a rare reprieve from the day-to-day negativity in France.
Radio and TV carried blanket coverage of the U.N. conference, while the center-left Le Monde daily, business newspaper Les Echos and the left-wing Libération all topped their homepages with blaring headlines about the president’s Palestinian statehood push (the latter paper going so far as to brand it a “historic day”).
Only the right-wing Le Figaro daily, France’s No. 2 paper owned by the Dassault Group, pooh-poohed the moment by placing its Macron story below a site-topper on the winner of this year’s Ballon d’Or football award, Ousmane Dembélé.
Sadly for Macron, that may be as good as it gets three years into his second term in power.
As much as the French may enjoy reviving the ghost of Gaullism, one good day is unlikely to resurrect the presidency of a leader who has cycled through five prime ministers in the past 15 months, and whose popularity score registered at a dismal 17 percent in a poll published over the weekend.
Before naming Sébastien Lecornu as his latest head of government, Macron’s aides were forced to deny he was considering stepping down from the presidency mid-term.