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LE PECQ, France (AP) — The question to France’s president about his teenage love with a high school teacher was so close to his bones, so moving in a country where politicians largely keep their private lives to themselves, that the interviewer didn’t she could muster up the courage to ask him.
So he made Emmanuel Macron imagine it.
“He is the president,” said the French leader, reading the question aloud from a piece of paper the interviewer handed him.
“He should set an example and not marry his teacher.”
Oh
A group of interviewers on the autism spectrum, described by their publication as “atypical journalists”, got the 45-year-old French president to talk about himself with unusual and enlightening candor in a televised interview this weekend, with candid but fairly unfiltered questions that professional journalists in most cases do not dare to ask the French leader.
Interviewers from Le Papotin, a magazine founded in 1990 at a day center for young autistic people in the Paris region, playfully criticized Macron for his marriage to Brigitte, his friends (he said he didn’t have many), Russian President Vladimir Putin and other things in his heart and thoughts.
In the process, they revealed some remarkably intimate details and gave Macron a platform to show a more personal side at a critical time in his second term as president. His government is embarking on a high-risk effort to push back France’s retirement age, a promised reform of the pension system that has enraged critics and threatened to bring protesters to the streets.
Le Papotin’s interviewers have questioned many notable people over the years, including former presidents Jacques Chirac and Nicolas Sarkozy and actor Vincent Cassel (“Ocean’s Twelve”, “Black Swan”). Their interview with Macron was filmed in Paris in November and broadcast by French broadcasters, who said the only rule was: “Anything can be said to Papotine, but above all anything can happen!”
Macron responded playfully even to probing about his romance with Brigitte, 24 years his senior. She was Brigitte Ozier, a married mother of three, when they met in high school, where he was a student and she was a teacher. She later moved to the French capital to join Macron and divorced. They got married in 2007.
“It’s not about setting an example or not, you know? When you are in love, the choice is not yours,” Macron said in his defense.
“She wasn’t really my teacher. She was my drama teacher. It’s not quite the same,” he ventured to add, a shake-up that Macron himself laughed at and which drew laughter and a “he’s clever!” sneer from one of the interviewers sitting next to him.
To another delicate question – “Do you have a lot of money?” — the former banker said he earns less now as president, without disclosing figures.
On friendship, he said, “It’s not the best job to have a lot of friends.”
And about Putin, whom he met, and the Russian president’s war in Ukraine, the French leader said: “When you meet him like that, he’s not unpleasant. That is the paradox.”
At the end of the half-hour question-and-answer session, Macron thanked his interviewers for a job well done.
“Your questions took me to a place … where I haven’t been in other interviews, with other journalists,” he said.
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