"Read it? Not even in your dreams!" a passer-by told Bernard Guetta, who implored him to take a look at the leaflet he was holding out to him. On the morning of Saturday, May 18, the number two on the French presidential majority's Renaissance (center) list for the European elections on June 9 was campaigning, handing out leaflets at the market in Calais in northern France. This was a first for the incumbent MEP, who had avoided the activity in 2019. The last time he handed out leaflets was in his high school days, in the late 1960s, when he and his comrades from the Jeunesses Communistes Révolutionnaires (Young Revolutionary Communists) campaigned against the Vietnam War.

Fifty years later, he was out in the street, defending Emmanuel Macron's policies to a young woman, a volunteer with Secours Catholique, who helps migrants. "Your track record as an MEP is dire for exiled people, especially here in Calais, where there have been 22 deaths this year," she said.

Then it was a listener from the France Inter radio station – where Guetta hosted a geopolitical segment for 27 years, from 1991 to 2018 – who recognized him: "Monsieur Guetta! I listened to you with so much admiration for so many years... And all this only to find out that, in fact, you're right-wing!"

"Why do you say I'm right-wing?" replied the former public service journalist. His interlocutor pointed to Macron's face on the leaflet he was holding. "You can't expect me to believe that he's not from the right! We voted for him to stop the Rassemblement National. And since then, he's done nothing but spit in our faces!" The woman in her 60s disappeared in a fit of rage, tearing up the program he was still trying to hand her.

"These people are far-left activists," said Brigitte Bourguignon, an adviser to the Pas-de-Calais region in northern France and former health minister, who was with him for the morning. Guetta, meanwhile, questioned "the psychological mechanism that leads to blaming someone for all the world's troubles," in this case Macron.

However, disillusioned Macron supporters are not only being recruited at the markets in droves. They can even be found in Guetta's inner political circle. In recent months, the Renew MEP has seen his good friend and former German MEP Daniel Cohn-Bendit break with Macronism. "Bernard [Guetta] is convinced that he's still doing important work where he is," Cohn-Bendit told Le Monde. "Personally, I think that France needs an environmentalist and socialist perspective which Raphaël Glucksmann is a part of."

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