Macron’s hidden game: Turn against Israel animated by rising political clout of French muslims

According to the latest Elabe/Les Echos polling, only 21 percent of the French — one citizen out of five — say they trust President Emmanuel Macron, writ large, and 73 percent say they don’t. 

More remarkably, only 41 percent of the French who voted for him in the 2022 presidential election say they still trust him, and 54 percent say they don’t any longer. 

Likewise, 62 percent of the French — according to an even more recent CSA poll — don’t trust the president either when it comes to stemming a rising tide of antisemitism, despite his protestations to the contrary. 

Monsieur Macron was indignant when both the prime minister of Israel, Benjamin Netanyahu, and the American ambassador to France, Charles Kushner, publicly questioned his stand in this matter a few days ago.

It looks like more than six French citizens out of ten side with Israel’s premier and America’s envoy rather than with their own president on this issue. 

“Trust” is a key word here. The French are not so absurdly down to earth as to expect their president to succeed in all his endeavors. Yet the record of the present administration — now in its eighth year — keeps getting worse. 

In 2024, France ranks 24th globally in gross domestic product per capita, according to the International Monetary Fund. 

That is down from 11th place in the 1990s and 19th in 2017, the year Monsieur Macron was first elected. Public debt has soared to around 113 percent of the GDP in 2024, placing France third in the European Union behind Greece and Italy. 

Insecurity is rampant: Serious assaults rose to 628.3 per 100,000 in 2023 from 396.5 per 100,000 reported in 2017, according to United Nations statistics.

Immigration has slipped out of control, leading 61 percent of the French to believe that a “great replacement” by non-European immigrants is underway. 

The political scene has been thrown into chaos after the reckless dissolution of 2024 and the election of a new, hung National Assembly. A centrist, François Bayrou, Macron’s fourth prime minister in less than two years, might not survive a vote of no-confidence next week.

Above all, though, what the French hold against Mr. Macron is his near pathological posturing and lecturing, his claim to be right even in failure, and his penchant for presenting himself, even when his actions reek of amateurish opportunism, as a paragon of wisdom and virtue. 

It is no exaggeration to say that his voice has been drowned out in domestic policy.

Yet things are still different on foreign affairs and national defense issues — long regarded by custom, if not by the letter of the Constitution, as the president’s reserved domain. 

On this front, Mr. Macron still holds a few key cards that could well ensure his political survival. And he takes care to use them to the fullest.

On his first election as president, Mr. Macron was not yet 40. When his second five-year term will be over, in 2027, he will not be 50. 

You cannot expect him to retire from public life at such a tender age. However, under a constitutional amendment passed in 2008 (which, incidentally, runs against the grain of the semi-monarchical 1958 constitution), the French president is now barred from running for more than two consecutive terms.

Monsieur Macron will thus have to step down for five years — or less, if his successor does not complete his own term. Yet he will  be allowed to run for a third term thereafter. Everything Mr. Macron does now is calculated with that comeback in mind. One must admit that, in this respect, the president shows a good deal of intuition and shrewdness. 

In particular, he has grasped that the two constituencies most firmly attached to him today — young people under 24 and Muslim immigrants — are precisely those destined, by demographic momentum, to carry even greater weight in the future. 

The Elabe/Les Echos poll cited above indeed points to an overall collapse in confidence in the president. Yet it also highlights a much stronger level of trust — some 33 percent — among those under 24. 

That puts Mr. Macron just six points behind the politician who currently enjoys the highest level of public confidence, the leader of the National Rally, Jordan Bardella.

For this trend to hold and solidify, and in order to outpace Monsieur Bardella, Monsieur Macron must align himself ever more closely with the ideologies and fantasies of Generation Z. 

While this may prove difficult to pursue at home, he can more readily advance such initiatives abroad — from supporting Ukraine to resisting President Trump’s America. This may accentuate his gadfly, even irresponsible, side in the eyes of many world leaders. Electorally, though, it is a shrewd investment.

As for Muslim voters, they tend to back politicians who appear to support the interests of the Islamic world. In the first round of the 2022 election, they voted overwhelmingly (69 percent) for the leftist Jean-Luc Mélenchon, an unwavering supporter of the Global South and the Palestinian Arab cause; but in the second round, faced with the nationalist Marine Le Pen, they swung even more sharply to Mr. Macron (85 percent).

The sharp pro-Palestinian turn taken by the president over the past two years — culminating now in the decision to recognize a “State of Palestine” — serves no other purpose than to wrest the French Muslim vote from Monsieur Mélenchon and the far left. 

It is all the easier for Monsieur Macron to lean on both Generation Z and Muslim immigrants as these two electorates overlap to a large extent. While Muslims currently make up only about 15 percent of the overall French population, they account for more than 25 percent of those under 24.