According to two participants at the meeting, the president called on his troops to better defend the track record of Renew MEPs. “We need a wake-up call for our troops, we need to mobilize a lot more,” the president said, according to one of the participants who was granted anonymity to discuss a sensitive issue.
“Right now, there is more commentary than mobilization, I would like that to change,” he added, according to the same participant.
This is not the first time that the president has made his displeasure known. During the Covid pandemic, the president reprimanded his teams over the slowness of the vaccination campaign in France, with the effect of accelerating the campaign but also distancing himself from the shortcomings of his administration.
With less than three months to go before the European parliamentary election in June, Macron’s alliance of centrist parties in France hasn’t quite found its stride in the campaign, said a person with knowledge of the campaign, who like others quoted here, was granted anonymity to discuss a sensitive topic. “The coalition struggles to find its place in a campaign where none of the [national] MPs are running, where there are no constituencies to fight for,” he said. “MPs and ministers aren’t yet at 100 percent in the campaign. “
But some allies have also expressed doubts publicly and privately about the president’s strategy of dramatizing the ideological fight with the far right.
Francois Bayrou, a French centrist and one of Macron’s earliest supporters, has said the far right shouldn’t be “the only topic of the campaign,” adding that it was “a gift” to focus so much attention on the National Rally