In 2017, a rumor spread in Paris and then everywhere in France. Emmanuel Macron, candidate for the presidency of the Republic, would be secretly homosexual and in a relationship with Mathieu Gallet, then president of Radio France. Since then, Emmanuel Macron has been elected and Mathieu Gallet was dismissed from Radio France in 2018 following a conviction for favoritism. In his new book, Power games (ed. Bouqins), he settles his accounts with Radio France and returns to the rumor, false, which linked him to the future head of state. An event he recounts on Thursday at the microphone of Philippe Vandel in Culture Media.
An instrument to bring down Emmanuel Macron
Mathieu Gallet told Europe 1 that he learned of the rumor at the end of 2015. First limited to a small Parisian circle, it then swelled, to the point of directly affecting the family of the former director of Radio France. “One day, it was my own aunt who, during a dinner in La Rochelle, told me about this rumor,” he explains.
For the former president of Radio France, he was only collateral damage in the strategy of discrediting the candidate Emmanuel Macron: “You have to tell yourself, I was only the instrument. The one who was targeted, c was Emmanuel Macron”, he slices. “Because some still thought that in the 2010s, saying that a politician was a hidden homosexual could prevent him from being President of the Republic.”
“I would have preferred him to warn me before”
Fortunately for Mathieu Gallet, Emmanuel Macron quickly defused the rumor, with humor. But without warning the person concerned beforehand. “It’s true that I would have preferred him to warn me before,” regrets Mathieu Gallet. “I found out at the same time as everyone else. So the next day he leaves me a message saying ‘By the way, I talked about us’. It’s funny because it’s a ‘we ‘ which is completely fictional, of course.”
However, Mathieu Gallet has no regrets about this clumsiness, which cost the president more than the former director of Radio France: “It was still a disgusting rumor to smear a man, a couple too, because I think a lot of Brigitte Macron”, he specifies. “I think she must have suffered a lot from that rumor during the campaign.”