PARIS — President Emmanuel Macron’s warm embrace of the American president, replete with hand-holding, hugs, and dandruff dusting, has come back to haunt the young French leader and open him to searing criticism from political opponents at home.
The lavish show of friendship with a US president who is deeply unpopular in France has cost Macron, whose support was already wobbling over perceptions that his policies have favored the rich. Macron’s unrequited pleas for policy shifts from Trump are perceived as failures, and more than half of those surveyed in a poll last weekend disapproved of his gushy performance, for which he got nothing in return.
The price to Macron’s standing has now been compounded by Trump’s decision last week to withdraw from the Iran accord, after Macron went to Washington last month, in part, to try to persuade the US president to preserve it.
France “prostituted itself’’ and “humiliated itself in its relations with the US,’’ Daniel Fasquelle, a member of Parliament from a center-right party in the opposition, told reporters in the halls of the Assemblée Nationale last week in the wake of Trump’s decision on Iran.
Another lawmaker, Clémentine Autain, on the left, said, “France favors a partner which happens to be a dangerous partner for world peace.’’
“France should bang its fist on the table,’’ she said, “rather than go courting Donald Trump.’’
Macron’s enthusiastic outreach to Trump is being contrasted unfavorably with the far cooler approach of other European leaders, like Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany, and his predecessors in the French presidency, who kept the Americans at arm’s length.
In addition to striking out on the Iran nuclear deal, Macron previously got nothing from Trump on climate change, and he has yet to win permanent exemptions on steel tariffs. As far as many French are concerned, he is zero for three.
“Macron’s alignment with Trump is a catastrophe,’’ said Patrick Cassan, a civil servant interviewed in the mixed-income 19th Arrondissement of Paris. Macron was “not only incapable of saying no’’ to Trump, he “served as his dishrag,’’ he said.
Others were equally disapproving of all the hugging and backslapping. “These gestures were like signs of vassalage,’’ with Macron playing the part of the serf, said J.C. Icart, a retired writer for scientific journals, interviewed outside the arrondissement’s City Hall. “In the feudal system, you showed your allegiance by this kind of touching.’’
Macron’s attitude toward Trump was rejected by 55 percent of respondents in a poll conducted by Odoxa for Le Figaro, one of France’s two leading daily newspapers. The US president’s decision to withdraw from the nuclear agreement with Iran was disapproved by three-quarters of those polled.
“The president is perceived as having failed in his strategy in regard to Donald Trump,’’ the polling company said.
Some were more forgiving of Macron, but not entirely. “He fought hard for the Iran accord. You can’t criticize him for that,’’ said Nicole Bacharan, an analyst of US-French relations formerly at the Hudson Institute. “He tried.’’
“On the other hand, many people in France were uneasy with these physical gestures,’’ she added. “The hugs seemed a bit immoderate, given the situation.’’
True, Macron’s speech to Congress was an oblique critique of Trump.
“I do not share the fascination for new strong powers, the abandonment of freedom, and the illusion of nationalism,’’ he said in a veiled slap at his host.
But the recent poll suggests that the images from the days preceding the speech drowned out Macron’s words.
Odoxa, the polling firm, found that the words “sycophantic,’’ “painful’’ and “failure’’ were among the most frequently used on social media to describe the Macron-Trump relationship.
Meanwhile, Macron himself has shown signs of trying to create some distance after the fruitless trip to Washington.
“We’ve made the choice to build peace and stability in the Near and Middle East,’’ Macron said in a speech last week from Aachen, Germany, after accepting an award for his efforts in Europe. “Other world powers,’’ he added, not mentioning Trump by name, “just as sovereign as ourselves, have decided not to respect their own word.’’
Afterward, he tried to explain his failure to university students in the German city.
“I’ve known him for a year. I have a lot of respect for him,’’ Macron said. “People know we have a warm relationship. But a warm relationship is not the relationship of a magician.’’
To be sure, French officials were under few illusions before Macron’s trip to Washington that he could persuade Trump to stay in the Iran nuclear deal. But since the announcement of the withdrawal, they have expressed anger over US threats of sanctions against European companies, and the menace to France’s sovereignty.
A spokesman for Macron’s political movement in Parliament defended the French president’s tactile approach to Trump. The French president, he said, would never have gotten anywhere deploying the kind of strategy — reason and logic — that might have worked with President Barack Obama.
“He used an emotional strategy’’ said Hervé Berville, who represents a district in Brittany. “With irrationality, you can deploy physical contact, touching.’’
Macron, judging by his speech in Aachen last week, himself appears to have drawn one principal lesson from his encounter with the US president: the need for more muscular European unity.
“If we accept that other great powers, including allies, including friends who have been with us in the darkest hours, put themselves in the position of deciding for us our diplomacy, our security, while putting us at severe risk,’’ he said, “then we are no longer sovereign, and we can’t credibly face public opinion.’’
