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JOHN LICHFIELD

OPINION: Macron will hope his risky ‘Borne Experiment’ is not a thriller

President Emmanuel Macron's choice for PM is a risky one, writes John Lichfield but Elisabeth Borne will have to learn fast if she is to deliver Macron victory in the upcoming parliamentary elections.

OPINION: Macron will hope his risky 'Borne Experiment' is not a thriller
(FILES) In this file photo taken on June 27, 2018 French President Emmanuel Macron and French Transports Minister Elisabeth Borne (L) look on after he signed the rail reform, at the Elysee Palace in Paris. - Elisabeth Borne was named as the new French Prime Minister on May 16, 2022. (Photo by Julien DE ROSA / POOL / AFP)

The new French government has a Hollywood sound to it: “The Borne Experiment”.

President Emmanuel Macon will hope that it is not a thriller. Elisabeth Borne, a decent, highly competent woman has not been chosen for her charisma or her vaulting ambition.

She has been chosen because she has links to the Left, because she will be hard-working and self-effacing and because she is a woman. Macon thought, quite rightly, that it was time that France had another female prime minister.

The first, Edith Cresson, lasted only 10 months in 1991-2 – a victim of many things including the jealousy of her male Socialist colleagues.

Times have moved on since then. Gender is unlikely to be Elisabeth Borne’s biggest problem. Her first great challenge will be to run the campaign for Macron’s centrist alliance in the parliamentary election next month despite never having stood for public office of any kind.

READ ALSO: What does a French Prime Minister actually do?

As head of state, Macron is not supposed to lead the campaign in the parliamentary elections. He has already, in fact, been campaigning in semi-public, pushing the boundaries of convention.

Now that he has finally appointed a prime minister, Borne will be expected to be one of the principal voices and faces of the campaign. She will also be expected to weld, or at least sticky-plaster, together the seven different factions in Ensemble!, the federation of Macron-supporting parties.

Borne was one of Macron’s first choices for PM just after his presidential election victory three weeks ago. She was side-lined while Macron looked at other possibilities, precisely because she was considered to lack the experience, charisma and public-speaking skills to lead the parliamentary campaign.

At the end of last week, it was reliably reported, Macron had settled on another choice: Catherine Vautrin, a former centre-right minister and president of the greater Rheims conurbation in Lorraine. Several Macron barons objected.

They pointed out that Vautrin had been a vocal opponent  of legalising gay marriage in 2012-4. Her appointment as PM, when Macron needed to attract the young and moderate left vote, would be unfortunate, they said.

Macron gave way. He returned to his original choice, the  reliable Elisabeth Borne.

Although atypical (because she is a woman) Borne is in many ways a typical member of the French ruling class. She went to a Grande Ecole (elite seat of third level education). She worked in  the private offices of senior Socialist politicians such as Lionel Jospin, François Hollande and Ségolène Royal.

She was the prefect (senior national government representative) of Poitou-Charente. She was the head of the Paris metro and bus service, the RATP.  

Macron set out an impossible CV for his third prime minister. She must be a woman. She must have knowledge of environmental and social questions. She must have a strong regional base and political experience.

Elisabeth Borne fulfills the first three requirements perfectly. She comes nowhere near points four or five.

In some respects her choice for PM is proof of what many have pointed out to be the great weakness of the Macron years: his failure to build a grass-roots political movement and to encourage the emergence of sub-chieftains below the supreme leader.

It used to be that French prime ministers (not always but often) were the obvious lieutenants within the President’s political family. Now that the political families are dysfuntional and the parties scarcely exist, almost anyone it seems can have their Warhoilian moment in the Hôtel Matignon, France’s Number Ten Downing Street.

Jean Castex was plucked from near obscurity to be Macron’s second prime minister in July 2020 –  and he made a pretty good fist of it. In choosing Elisabeth Borne, Macron has gone for a female Castex.

Her job is to be impressive but not so impressive that she overshadows Macron (as Edouard Philippe, Macron’s first PM had threatened to do).

She has to be ambitious to succeed but not ambitious for herself.

She has to learn how to be a politician while already holding the second most important job in French politics. She is running for parliament in “my” constituency, the 6th circonscription  of  Calvados in Normandy.

In purely electoral terms, Elisabeth Borne is a risky choice. Nonetheless, despite her inexperience and despite the fractious mood of the country, I expect her to “lead” the Macron parliamentary alliance to victory on 12 and 19 June.

For reasons I have explained here before, I believe that Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s Left alliance will do reasonably well but has no chance of winning a majority of the 577 seats in the national assembly.

A TV debate – if there is one – between the histrionic Mélenchon and the understated Borne will be a thing to behold.

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POLITICS

How disinformation targeting Brigitte Macron spread to the US and UK

Years after false posts began circulating on social media claiming that Brigitte Macron is a transgender woman, the French first lady remains the target of fake claims with the transphobic disinformation now being spread in the US and the UK.

How disinformation targeting Brigitte Macron spread to the US and UK

President Emmanuel Macron, 46, has in recent weeks lashed out at the false information spread about his wife, 70, who is taking legal action against those behind the allegations.

Prominent US right-wing commentator Candace Owens vehemently attacked the first lady in a now-deleted YouTube video posted on March 11th, propagating a false claim that first exploded in France just weeks before the 2022 presidential election.

Brigitte Macron is falsely said to have been born as a man called Jean-Michel Trogneux, her maiden surname, with that name going viral as a hashtag.

Macron is among a group of influential women – including former US first lady Michelle Obama and New Zealand ex-premier Jacinda Ardern – who have fallen victim to a growing trend: disinformation about their gender or sexuality to mock or humiliate them.

While this gendered disinformation is particularly visible in repeated attacks on prominent figures, it also affects women in general and sexual or gender minorities with differing levels of responsibility in public life.

According to the US-based observer group, the National Democratic Institute (NDI), the goal is to drive women “off the platforms and out of public life”, which has serious consequences for democracy.

Originally shared in the United States on sites like notorious disinformation hub 4chan, the claim snowballed when figures “with very large audiences gave it visibility”, doctoral researcher Sophie Chauvet, specialising in audience metrics, told AFP.

In her video, conservative commentator Owens cites a “thorough investigation” by so-called independent journalist Natacha Rey, published in the French newsletter Faits et Documents in 2021.

Founded in 1996 by far-right French figure Emmanuel Ratier and now headed by Xavier Poussard, Faits et Documents regularly promotes stories targeting the first lady, a journalist at the French weekly L’Obs, Emmanuelle Anizon, told AFP.

“But what is new is that Xavier Poussard started translating his articles at the end of 2023,” Anizon said, adding that he claims to have sent an English version to those close to former US president Donald Trump.

Anizon, who spoke to Poussard and his associate Aurelien Poirson who advised on the translation, explained that it was no accident that the US far right had taken up the false claim ahead of the November US elections.

“It was their dream to export this claim across the Atlantic,” she said.

And it worked, spreading like wildfire after Owens posted her video with two associated hashtags shared tens of thousands of times on X, according to social network analysis tool Visibrain.

The false claims have also been repeated by tabloid newspapers in the UK.

The disinformation “was available as and when required”, said Sebastian Dieguez, an expert in conspiracy theories at the University of Fribourg in Switzerland.

The “secretly trans” narrative is a long-standing feature of online, sexist violence, according to a 2021 Wilson Center report.

The bottom line, according to the NDI, is that silencing women has “serious consequences for human rights, diversity in public debates and the media, and ultimately, democracy.”

The impact is also personal for those targeted and their families.

Emmanuel Macron addressed the fake claims on International Women’s Day, saying, “the worst thing is false information”.

“People eventually believe them and disturb you, even in your private life,” he said.

The president’s relationship with his wife 24 years his senior, whom he met while she was a teacher and he was still a teenager, is periodically a source of media attention in France and abroad.

On March 22nd, a 51-year-old man was arrested in southwestern France for allegedly writing “Brigitte Macron, transsexual” on his garage, according to the French daily Le Figaro.

The first lady and her brother Jean-Michel Trogneux have taken legal action against two women who posted a YouTube video in December 2021 alleging she had once been a man named “Jean-Michel”.

A Paris criminal court is to try them on charges of defamation in March next year, a source close to the case has said.

The first lady’s daughter from her first marriage, Tiphaine Auzière, on Tuesday said she hoped the trial could quash the “grotesque” claims.

“Whether it’s my mother or anyone else in society, it can do a lot of harm,” Auzière told the BFMTV broadcaster.

“The justice system… can put an end to this misinformation and severely condemn the perpetrators because it’s a form of harassment like any other.”

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