The day after Emmanuel Macronwon the 2017 presidential election, as a 39-year-old wunderkind who had been unknown to the French public just three years before, those close to him congratulated themselves: “We launched Emmanuel Macron like a product.” Adrien Taquet, a publicist with the Jésus et Gabriel agency, suggested a logo and name for the future candidate’s movement (En Marche!, with the same initials as Macron). For the website, he drew inspiration from the American brand Apple: a neutral interface, “centered on the product.” Convinced that political parties had failed, Macron offered a revamped political vision: a “citizens’ movement,” open to civil society and founded on transcending the left-right divide. When launching his movement on April 6, 2016, in Amiens, Macron refused to line up a host of seasoned politicians, seeking to break away from the conventions of the traditional political rally.
Ten years later, Gabriel Attal, who dreams of succeeding the president at the Elysée, is disturbingly drawing inspiration from the same marketing strategies. At a time when French politics is plagued by deep disrepute, further worsened by the failed Assemblée Nationale dissolution in 2024, the head of Renaissance, not yet an official presidential candidate but actively preparing, organized on Tuesday, January 27, at Paris’s Palais Brongniart a “Night of the New Republic” centered on “civil society,” while heavily promoting its “innovations.” The event, co-hosted by an artificial intelligence named “Night,” ran until midnight. The roundtable topics, which brought together employer and union partners, business leaders, intellectuals and political scientists, were purposefully provocative: “Do we need to break everything to rebuild France?”
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