One is President of the Republic, the other was. Emmanuel Macron and Nicolas Sarkozy get along well and do not hide it. Ideologically as personally, the two men maintain a certain closeness.
During the 2022 presidential election, François Hollande’s historic rival even gave barely veiled support to candidate Macron when his political family had its own candidate, Valérie Pécresse.
The failure of the Republicans is undeniable and difficult to digest for the president of the Ile-de-France region. “All of this is the fault of Sarkozy who, by his silence, has weakened my campaign. He wants an alliance with Macron and did not want me to be elected”, she then declared in a small committee, according to Le Canard enchaîné.
For his part, Nicolas Sarkozy assumed his choice without difficulty. “I was very transparent during the presidential campaign, I supported Emmanuel Macron. And if I had to do it again, I would do it again”, he explained in October 2022 in the columns of the Journal du Dimanche, n not hesitating to shower the newly re-elected head of state with praise: “I have always thought that, faced with a country which has demonstrated, through its history, its eruptive capacities, having a calm, moderate president, refusing any form of excess, was the best solution. You don’t respond to an eruptive situation by being eruptive yourself: you need composure, moderation and experience. It seems to me that President Macron has these qualities.”
If the former President of the Republic did not hesitate to support Emmanuel Macron, the latter does not hesitate to draw inspiration from his predecessor in his way of governing and communicating.
The choice of words, the way of speaking, the position, the clothes… Every detail is important in politics. These decisions are specific to the characters of each politician and above all, to the image they want to project.
According to Damon Mayaffre, author of Macron or the mystery of the verb, the head of state and Nicolas Sarkozy have certain significant similarities in their communication strategies.
“Both use the first person singular ‘I’ a lot when addressing French people. One adds the verb ‘vouloir’, the other the verb ‘savoir’, both placing themselves in dominant postures on their interlocutors s. In the form they both adopt and like others before them too, a certain martiality which was not necessarily appropriate for example with François Hollande”, explains the expert in the columns of Humanity , specifying that “both adopt when they have journalists facing them, infantilizing or contemptuous remarks. They know better than their interlocutors and explain their truth to them.”
Similarities that seem to mask a thinly veiled inspiration of the President of the Republic towards Nicolas Sarkozy.
Since his speech where he announced the “100 days” of appeasement, Emmanuel Macron left his presidential palace to meet the French. In less than four weeks, he has made six trips, a fairly unprecedented figure. This strategy is reminiscent of that adopted by Nicolas Sarkozy during his presidential campaigns.
“There is a small side to Nicolas Sarkozy with the idea of ​​saturating the media space”, thus deciphers a former collaborator of the Head of State with our colleagues from BFMTV. “A well-orchestrated field trip by the President is the first subject with which the evening television news begins, a piece in all the regional daily press, several hours on the news channels. It is an extremely powerful tool “, he adds.
Liberal ideology, sense of communication, the similarities that unite Emmanuel Macron and his predecessor are not insignificant. They put into perspective the rumors predicting a potential arrival of Nicolas Sarkozy at the Hotel Matignon.