Almost Marx reads @Peter_Conradi on Brigitte Macron
Headline: Brigitte Macron ‘advises president on understanding the French
Less than a year into his second term President Macron cuts an increasingly isolated figure: his ratings are poor, the team that helped him to power in 2017 has broken up and his landmark pension reforms face resistance in parliament and on the street, with mass protests across the country again this weekend.
Yet help is at hand from a more popular resident of the Elysée Palace: Brigitte Macron, his wife and former school teacher, who is said to be giving the president discreet lessons on how to understand the mood of their ever fractious compatriots.
The première dame, 69, sees her role as telling her husband, 45, what people are talking about in their corner cafés, the magazine Le Point claimed in a detailed profile last week. She allegedly scribbles down notes of what she sees and hears during the day and briefs him when they finally sit down alone every evening. She also shares with the president, widely viewed as an aloof technocrat, the contents of the 20,000 letters she receives each year, many reflecting the gloom enveloping France.
Underlying her thinking is a desire to be “useful” for the country but getting the balance right in her role is akin to walking along a mountain ridge and avoiding falling in either direction, she confided. “There are those who think I am lazy and those who think I ought not to be here,” France’s first lady said.
The couple, the magazine claimed, are already contemplating what to do when the president leaves office in 2027: still not 50 by then, he may seek another high-profile job, such as president of the European Commission or start his own foundation, perhaps even in New York. She will be 74.
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The Times is the headquarters for Royal Apologetics, so Mr. Conradi celebratory missive is a central propaganda corollary, of the demonization of the Great Unwashed, that have never really been gone from French Political Life. Except in the pages of The Times. Of Late Harry and Meghan has been the target of the Royalists at the ‘newspaper’ .
Conradi continues with this:
Macron’s government has given itself until Friday to get a first reading of the measure through parliament, but, without a majority, is struggling to get the support it needs — which could leave him with little alternative but to push the measure through by decree, at the risk of more trouble on the streets. Demonstrations took place across France yesterday with unions saying that half a million people protested in Paris alone, though the interior ministry put the number at 93,000, a record since protests began last month, and 963,000 in France as a whole.
And then Conradi lapses, in the remainder of the essay, into more political kitsch featuring Brigitte Macron… Its the stuff of Hollywood Public Relations drivel, think of all those feature stories about Nancy Reagan and ‘Just Say No’!
Almost Marx
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