Macron is Afraid to Go Down in History as the Leader Who 'Lost Africa'

While French President Emmanuel Macron tries to maintain his façade as a tough guy in politics, his approval rating in France continues to sag.

According to a recent Ipsos poll, Macron’s Renaissance party’s rating dropped to a measly 17%, compared to, for example, Marin Le Pen’s right-wing Rassemblement National (RN) party’s 32% rating.

Currently, Macron witnesses his position weakening, both “personally” as the incumbent president and “politically with his centrist-globalist party low performance,” argues Paolo Raffone, a strategic analyst and director of the CIPI Foundation in Brussels.

“Macron does not care about public opinion, following the “power” tradition of France. He knows that he has no appeal for the public opinion in France and he acts as an absolute sovereign to save the state,” Raffone tells Sputnik.

At the same time, the analyst notes, Macron is essentially a “narcissist” who “does not want to be remembered as the worst president of France”: namely, as the president who witnessed France losing its hold on Africa.

“Macron has still a couple of years in office as president of France, and he cannot be reelected after this term. In this context, Macron is trying to play all his remaining cards to reinvent a political role for France in Europe,” he said.

In French and EU politics, Macron is attempting to sow division among the other right-wing parties, while abroad he seeks to recover his reputational losses over the African fiasco by “trying to play a role in the Caucasus – pro Armenia and anti-Turkiye and Azerbaijan” – and in the Ukrainian conflict.

“It is again a gamble with two objectives: the first, is to replace Germany’s leadership in EU foreign policy, the second, pre-position France in the eyes of the US current and future administration attempting to balance the troubled UK’s Tory leadership that could be replaced by Labor at the end of 2024 (or earlier),” Raffone explains.

The analyst also pointed out that Macron and the French establishment are well aware of the fact that “France is no more a power, not militarily and not economically,” and that the so-called “’French-German axis’ is a fake.”