How Emmanuel Macron replaced Barack Obama as the world's coolest leader

Ooh la la, have you felt the Macron Frisson?
Macron: a politician in the Obama mould
Getty Images

There were many reasons to mourn President Obama’s departure from office. But chief among them was the realisation that politics had lost its single ambassador for unstudied charisma. Someone you could fancy, unironically; someone who could make a straightforward gesture go viral, who only needed to wink and you’d make it your smartphone screensaver.

Obviously, Trump is an unappealing chump. Theresa May might be strong and stable but you cannot fancy her and a May photo opportunity — unless choreographed like the Vogue shoot — regularly elides into a public humiliation (the cone of chips). Even Justin Trudeau — so cute! — is a little too cute. You fancy him, certainly, but there is something too clean about him. He has no edge. It is not his fault: he is Canadian.

But, very rarely, the world delivers. On Sunday night, when Emmanuel Macron was elected to the Elysée Palace, the right-thinking world exhaled with relief — and then started salivating. For Macron is a man in the Obama mould. He is hot, he is cool. He has an effect on people. Let us call it the Macron Frisson.

Like Obama, he is a Left-ish politician who speaks about reshaping the world. He is animated on policy and suave in photographs. His eyes follow you around the room like he is appraising you. Obviously, he is French, and French people are naturally beguiling.

Plus, his history is titillating: his wife, Brigitte, is 24 years his senior, and she was also his teacher. They met when he was 17 and he later entreated her to leave her husband for him. Reportedly, it scandalised his small town (and his parents). That’s hot.

He has the same knack as Obama for turning a banal gesture into an inexplicably captivating moment that goes viral on the internet. Macron’s watershed moment — pun intended — is a two-second clip of him flipping a plastic bottle in the air.

It lands perfectly. He does it with the deft agility of someone who knows that he will get it right every time.

French president-elect Emmanuel Macron at a Victory Day Ceremony

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He is suited and booted unfussily: Macron is stylish but unremarkably so, for he has more to think about. He is an intellectual and a disciple of French literature. And lastly, there is something ruthlessly Shakespearean about his political origin story: he was the incumbent Socialist President Hollande’s wünderkind in the French economics department before splitting with the party to form En Marche! and, ultimately, winning the presidency.

Watching Macron and Hollande complete their first official engagement together on Monday one could not forget this. And yet somehow, it plays even more to Macron’s credit. Mon Dieu.

Follow Phoebe Luckhurst on Twitter: @phoebeluckhurst

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