On Monday, June 10, the day after the surprise announcement of the dissolution of the Assemblée Nationale, Emmanuel Macron visited the town of Oradour-sur-Glane, the site of a massacre of 634 civilians under Nazi occupation, as part of the commemorations of the 80th anniversary of France's Liberation. He crosses paths with a major business leader, a man familiar with the Elysée, who shared a word of encouragement with him: "Not too hard, these days?" The president smiled: "Not at all! I've been preparing this for weeks, and I'm delighted. I've thrown my grenade at their legs. Now, we'll see how they deal with it..."
The presidency has denied this conversation: "The remarks anonymously attributed to Emmanuel Macron, reported in the newspaper Le Monde, have not been verified with the Elysée's teams, and do not correspond to the President's word." Le Monde stands by its reporting.
Macron has always suggested that he despises politics and its representatives. He himself was never elected to any position before the Elysée. In 2016, his "great march" to sound out the French before the presidential election had, according to him, enabled him to gauge people's distrust of politics, which they perceived as a source of divisions and blockages, and the cause of the system's dysfunction for the past 30 years. The "start-up nation" Macron promised would be "depoliticized," "de-ideologized," and aimed at efficiency. "I don't like politics, I like doing," he said, in 2017, to writer Philippe Besson, describing elected officials and party leaders as "shopkeepers who run a corner of the street."
On June 12, at a press conference designed to explain the reasons behind the reckless dissolution, he once again castigated the parties and their alleged tricks. "Since Sunday evening, the masks are coming off," he said, alone on a white stage, before a full contingent of his ministers, who listened to him silently, whether calm or frozen in place. "It's also a test of truth, between those who choose to make their own businesses prosper and those who want to make France prosper."
Yet Macron has shown a very different side of himself since his arrival at the Elysée in 2017. After blaming the "old world" for everything – sometimes quite rightly – he himself has given the impression that he had become caught up in political tactics, obsessed with his plan to eradicate the left and the right in order to set up his face-off with the populists, which guaranteed his power. Disappointed Macronists have been wont to say that their ex-champion, who was expected to be a great reformer and a weak politician, has, on the contrary, shown himself to be a lukewarm reformer but a formidable tactician who is actually passionate about politicking.
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