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Macron under fire for honouring Bezos with top award

President Emmanuel Macron was under fire from the French left on Friday for handing billionaire Amazon founder Jeff Bezos the country's highest order of merit.

Published: 24 February 2023 16:19 CET

Macron under fire for honouring Bezos with top award

Jeff Bezos in Washington, DC on October 22, 2019. (Photo by MANDEL NGAN / AFP)

Critics said the award showed Macron really was “the president of the rich” as he is regularly labelled by members of the opposition.

Macron’s office on Friday confirmed a press report from a day earlier, saying Bezos had been given the Legion d’Honneur (Legion of Honour), the French republic’s highest award, in a small ceremony.

The event’s took place on February 16, the same day hundreds of thousands of people joined strikes and protests against Macron’s plan to reform the French pension system.

Critics say the reform plan is particularly unfair towards low-income workers without a university education, because they would see their already long working lives stretched out even further.

Macron’s office kept quiet about the award ceremony until weekly Le Point broke the news in its latest edition.

On Friday, the Elysee Palace defended the decision to honour Bezos, calling him “a partner in France’s initiatives for the protection of the climate and of biodiversity, especially of forests”.

But the award unleashed a wave of angry comments from Macron’s political opponents.

“He is more than ever the president of the rich,” said Bastien Lachaud, a deputy for the leftwing LFI party.

“Having already given a decoration to (Saudi Crown Prince) Mohammed bin Salman, a murderer of journalists, Macron has now awarded the Legion of Honour to Jeff Bezos, a champion of tax evasion, and a destroyer of jobs and nature,” he said on Twitter.

Rare award for business leader

Addressing Bezos directly another LFI member, Leila Chaibi, said that “while we were marching against his pension reform, Macron awarded you a decoration in France’s name for avoiding billions in tax, destroying the planet and spying on staff. A well earned prize from the president of the rich”.

Communist party leader Fabien Roussel said Macron’s “doctrine” was to “punish all French people and reward the billionaires”.

Socialist deputy Herve Saulignac said he “really can’t understand” the justification for the award. “Is it for being the best tax evader? Or for being the greatest gravedigger of traditional retailers?”, he asked.

Bezos’s net worth is $119 billion, according to financial data company Bloomberg, making him the world’s third-richest person after luxury empire LVMH’s chairman Bernard Arnault and tech billionaire Elon Musk.

Some reports said that Arnault was at the Bezos award ceremony, but a source with knowledge of the guest list told AFP that he had not attended the event.

The Legion of Honour, first established by Napoleon Bonaparte at the start of the 19th century, is France’s highest order of merit for both soldiers and civilians.

Primarily aimed at French nationals, it is also regularly awarded to foreigners if they are deemed to have served France or its ideals.

Past United States recipients include singer Bob Dylan, jazz star Miles Davis, culinary icon Julia Child, civil rights leader Jesse Jackson and actor Arnold Schwarzenegger.

Business leaders rarely get the award, although former Airbus chief John Leahy and Jeong H. Kim, former president of Bell Labs, are among the American exceptions.

Member comments

Anonymous - 24 February 2023 at 17:28 CET

This is really sycophantic and disgusting. Unbelievable!

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Azerbaijan vehemently rejects the accusation it bears responsibility for the riots that have led to the deaths of five people and rattled the Paris government.

But it is just the latest in a litany of tensions between Paris and Baku and not the first time France has accused Azerbaijan of being behind an alleged disinformation campaign.

The riots in New Caledonia, a French territory lying between Australia and Fiji, were sparked by moves to agree a new voting law that supporters of independence from France say discriminates against the indigenous Kanak population.

Paris points to the sudden emergence of Azerbaijani flags alongside Kanak symbols in the protests, while a group linked to the Baku authorities is openly backing separatists while condemning Paris.

“This isn’t a fantasy. It’s a reality,” interior minister Gérald Darmanin told television channel France 2 when asked if Azerbaijan, China and Russia were interfering in New Caledonia.

“I regret that some of the Caledonian pro-independence leaders have made a deal with Azerbaijan. It’s indisputable,” he alleged.

But he added: “Even if there are attempts at interference… France is sovereign on its own territory, and so much the better”.

“We completely reject the baseless accusations,” Azerbaijan’s foreign ministry spokesman Ayhan Hajizadeh said.

“We refute any connection between the leaders of the struggle for freedom in Caledonia and Azerbaijan.”

In images widely shared on social media, a reportage broadcast Wednesday on the French channel TF1 showed some pro-independence supporters wearing T-shirts adorned with the Azerbaijani flag.

Tensions between Paris and Baku have grown in the wake of the 2020 war and 2023 lightning offensive that Azerbaijan waged to regain control of its breakaway Nagorno-Karabakh region from ethnic Armenian separatists.

France is a traditional ally of Christian Armenia, Azerbaijan’s neighbour and historic rival, and is also home to a large Armenian diaspora.

Darmanin said Azerbaijan – led since 2003 by President Ilham Aliyev, who succeeded his father Heydar – was a “dictatorship”.

On Wednesday, the Paris government also banned social network TikTok from operating in New Caledonia.

Tiktok, whose parent company is Chinese, has been widely used by protesters. Critics fear it is being employed to spread disinformation coming from foreign countries.

Azerbaijan invited separatists from the French territories of Martinique, French Guiana, New Caledonia and French Polynesia to Baku for a conference in July 2023.

The meeting saw the creation of the “Baku Initiative Group”, whose stated aim is to support “French liberation and anti-colonialist movements”.

The group published a statement this week condemning the French parliament’s proposed change to New Caledonia’s constitution, which would allow outsiders who moved to the territory at least 10 years ago the right to vote in its elections.

Pro-independence forces say that would dilute the vote of Kanaks, who make up about 40 percent of the population.

“We stand in solidarity with our Kanak friends and support their fair struggle,” the Baku Initiative Group said.

Raphael Glucksmann, the lawmaker heading the list for the French Socialists in June’s European Parliament elections, told Public Senat television that Azerbaijan had made “attempts to interfere… for months”.

He said the underlying problem behind the unrest was a domestic dispute over election reform, not agitation fomented by “foreign actors”.

But he accused Azerbaijan of “seizing on internal problems.”

A French government source, who asked not to be named, said pro-Azerbaijani social media accounts had on Wednesday posted an edited montage purporting to show two white police officers with rifles aimed at dead Kanaks.

“It’s a pretty massive campaign, with around 4,000 posts generated by (these) accounts,” the source told AFP.

“They are reusing techniques already used during a previous smear campaign called Olympia.”

In November, France had already accused actors linked to Azerbaijan of carrying out a disinformation campaign aimed at damaging its reputation over its ability to host the Olympic Games in Paris. Baku also rejected these accusations.