LE PECQ, France (AP) — The question to France’s president about his teenage romance with a teacher at his high school was so upfront, so striking in a country where politicians largely keep their private lives to themselves, that the interviewer couldn’t muster up the courage to ask.
So he got Emmanuel Macron to imagine it.
“He’s the President,” said the French leader, reading the question aloud from a slip of paper handed to him by his interviewer.
“He should set a good example and not marry his teacher.”
Ouch.
A group of interviewers on the autism spectrum, dubbed “atypical journalists” in their publication, prompted France’s 45-year-old president to speak about himself with unusual and revealing frankness a television interview this weekend with open but fair, unfiltered questions that professional journalists usually do not dare to ask the French head of state.
Interviewers from Le Papotin, a magazine founded in 1990 at a day care center for young people with autism in the Paris region, playfully quizzed Macron about his marriage to Brigitte, his friends (he said he didn’t have many), the Russian president Vladimir Putin and other matters in his heart and mind.
In doing so, they revealed some remarkably intimate details and gave Macron a platform to show a more personal side at a critical juncture in his second term as president. His government is making a risky attempt to push back the retirement age in France, a promised reform of the pension system that has enraged critics and threatens to unleash protesters on the streets.
Le Papotin interviewers have interviewed many notable figures over the years, including former Presidents Jacques Chirac and Nicolas Sarkozy, and actor Vincent Cassel (Ocean’s Twelve, Black Swan). Her Macron interview was filmed in Paris in November and broadcast by France Televisions, which said the only rule was: “You can tell the papotin anything, but above all anything can happen!”
Macron reacted playfully, even when asked about his romance with Brigitte, 24 years his senior. She was Brigitte Auzière, a married mother of three, when they met at the grammar school where he was a student and she a teacher. She later moved to the French capital to join Macron and got divorced. They married in 2007.
“It’s not about setting an example or not, you know? When you’re in love, you have no choice,” Macron said in his defense.
“She wasn’t really my teacher. She was my drama teacher. It’s not quite the same,” he also ventured, a wobble that made Macron himself giggle and provoked roaring laughter and a teasing “He’s smart!” by one of the interviewers sitting next to him.
Answering another thorny question – “Do you have a lot of dough?” – the former banker said he’s making less now as president, without disclosing numbers.
Of friendship, he said, “It’s not the best job to have a lot of friends.”
And speaking of Putin, whom he met, and the Russian President’s war in Ukraine, the French leader said: “If you meet him like that, he’s not uncomfortable. 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 led me to reasons … where I haven’t been in other interviews with other journalists,” he said.