Emmanuel Macron has never been seen like this: with a three-day stubble, dressed in jeans and a hoody adorned with the emblem of a French paratrooper company.
Photographed by its official photographer.
The mockery was not long in coming - at last his rivals in the race for power in France had something to criticize about the incumbent.
Because Putin's war in Ukraine has given Macron a sharp rise in approval ratings.
The voters are honoring their president's tireless attempts to keep the Russian president from going to war and to maintain personal contact with Vladimir Putin.
Will that be enough to stay in office?
Or is Emmanuel Macron, whose performances have regularly been criticized as arrogant and his political solo efforts as ruthless, overdoing it with the staging?
"The French like it when they are well represented to the outside world," says Britta Sandberg, SPIEGEL correspondent in Paris.
»It is the old need to still present something on the international stage, to be taken seriously by others and to continue to play a major role in Europe.
At the moment, Macron meets all these criteria«.
Macron is also benefiting from the fact that his closest rivals are having serious problems repositioning themselves on the war and in particular on Vladimir Putin.
This applies to Marine Le Pen's "Rassemblement National" and even more to the right-wing extremist Éric Zemmour, who spoke of his deep admiration for Putin just a few days before Russia invaded Ukraine.
The Conservative candidate, Valérie Pécresse, hasn't scored any points either and is getting caught up in sometimes vociferous attempts to distance herself from the right-wing parties.
So Macron could win the election as President of France again.
His domestic political problems, however, such as the pension reform that has not yet been implemented, remain with him, even if around 30 percent of his compatriots would probably vote for him at the moment.
"The other 70 percent don't appear at first," says Britta Sandberg, "that could change in the parliamentary elections.
And it could also turn out that the displeasure and the protests, which were not expressed in the presidential elections due to this crisis situation, are then expressed in June in the so-called legislative, i.e. in the parliamentary elections”.
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