It was not supposed to be a communication operation for the presidential election of 2022 - the strategists of the head of state, informed, were not in the loop -, but it looked very much like it. Thursday evening, during her intervention in 20 hours Le Mag on TF 1, Brigitte Macron spoke more about the president than about Operation Yellow Pieces, defending her husband, ensuring "to hear" the country's anger and even presenting himself as "a kind of go-between" between her husband and the French. What reminds Bernadette Chirac who had played a significant role in the re-election of her husband in 2002, gradually increasing in power in the media.
"We are two years away from the presidential election, everyone is back on the campaign trail!" She comes to the aid of her husband, in difficulty, to speak to the popular electorate. She is the only one who can do it in the macronist device with Le Drian, "analyzes the communicator Philippe Moreau Chevrolet of the agency MCBG Conseil. Chance of the calendar, this interview fell the same day that Marine Le Pen declared for 2022.
"Brigitte is the best ambassador for the president," judges a relative, rather satisfied with his speech, which gathered 4.9 million viewers on average. Especially since her previous interview at 1 p.m. of TF 1, in duplex with Jean-Pierre Pernaut on January 8, had been judged rather failed: "Her headset didn't work, she only heard one word out of two, she had no return, she was devastated! Hence the choice, this time, of a face-to-face sitting with the presenter of the news, Gilles Bouleau.
Initially, it was only for the first lady to highlight the Yellow Pieces operation, which she took over at the head of the Hôpital de Paris-Hôpitaux de France foundation. No question from the journalist of TF 1 however on this collection, mentioned earlier in a report. "He didn't tell me about the Yellow Pieces!" She was surprised afterwards. The interview had been recorded Wednesday noon under the conditions of the direct to the Parisian hospital Robert-Debré, where the first lady was stopping to collect donations. “She obviously didn't have the questions in advance. Since her interview with Marc-Olivier Fogiel on RTL in June, she knows that we can question her about anything and everything, ”specifies her entourage.
"We will see if she succeeds in saving soldier Macron"
In the end, she mostly mentioned her husband, in the midst of a social storm against the pension reform, trying to rectify his image of president deemed arrogant and brittle. And this even as Emmanuel Macron had these days a stormy explanation in Pau with a professor, whom he accused of ... "sloppy in the head". Something to remember his famous "little sentences", supposed to belong to the past. "She comes to mine clearance, her role, her real job, is to say that her husband is human and sympathetic," continues Philippe Moreau Chevrolet, who however notes that she suffers from an image of "great bourgeoisie". "We will see if she succeeds in saving Private Macron. It’s his best spin doctor. ”
Brigitte Macron will she climb more on the front line as 2022 approaches? "She hates putting herself in front of the cameras, she hates that, for her it's complicated," swears an intimate, who nevertheless judges that she is "a major asset" for her husband. On February 15, after hesitating, she could go to Nice to close the yellow rooms. A displacement which, she knows, would inevitably be interpreted as an incursion into the municipal countryside. Like Bernadette Chirac who, before the local elections of 2001, had embarked on a tour of France in support of the candidates.
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Will she imitate her illustrious predecessor, who had published six months before the presidential election in 2002 a successful interview book ("Conversations", with Patrick de Carolis, at Plon). The first lady writes about her daily lives in notebooks from the countryside. "If she takes them out, it will not be in the middle of the countryside," said a relative. Which does not exclude anything for later.