Reporting
Article reserved for subscribers
The Head of State continues his “tour of France” as a pre-candidate. After the Creuse on Monday, he was in Haute-Vienne on Tuesday to try to patch things up with the officials.
“Why are they applauding him? It’s not Poulidor…” At the foot of the collegiate church of Saint-Léonard-de-Noblat, stronghold of the former cycling champion, Nadine, in her sixties, seems perplexed, before deducing for herself: “After all, it is true that he is in the countryside.” It doesn’t matter that Emmanuel Macron, who has just arrived in this city of Haute-Vienne where he must talk about public service and rurality, is still not officially a candidate for his succession. Neither Nadine, nor the gray heads and the few young people who made the trip in search of selfies, nor anyone in fact, is fooled.
The Head of State does not seek to avoid the crowd and its questions, quite the contrary. Here he is master of the clocks again. At the heart of this curious period of waiting, no one but him can decree the end of the false suspense. Obviously, he is having fun with the situation and savoring this power regained over time, after two years of a pandemic which made him lose control of the agenda. To a young man who asks him if he will run for a second term, …