Macron's Last Chance for Football Glory to Boost Presidency

PARIS — Kylian Mbappé and the French national football team will travel to North America this month dreaming of winning the World Cup for the third time.

For France’s lame-duck president, Emmanuel Macron, it’ll be one final chance to draft off football success in a way he’s so far failed to achieve.

“When it comes to football, the president absolutely doesn’t have to force it, he can talk about it for hours,” said Karl Olive, a lawmaker who is close to Macron. “There are few opportunities to unite the population … it would be nice to have a moment where, opinions aside, we can celebrate.”

The 47-year-old president’s tenure has coincided with one of the most successful periods in the history of men’s football in France. Since his 2017 election, Les Bleus won the World Cup in 2018, claimed the UEFA Nations League title in 2021, finished second at the 2022 World Cup and reached the semifinal at the 2024 UEFA European Football Championship.

Yet despite repeated attempts to associate himself with the team’s performances — from the rain-soaked podium in Moscow in 2018 to the dejected Doha locker room in 2022 — Macron has struggled to convert either football glory or any other French sporting success into political rocket fuel.

The 2018 World Cup win was quickly overshadowed by a scandal involving his deputy chief of staff who had assaulted protesters while posing as a police officer weeks earlier, and then the massive Yellow Jackets protests that kicked off that fall. Macron also failed to net a visible popularity boost from the successful 2024 Paris Olympics, which took place while the country was still reeling from his ill-fated decision to dissolve parliament.

A successful 2026 World Cup run by the French may be Macron’s last opportunity for a mandate-defining positive national moment.

Should the team win, it may provide the type of sporting euphoria that pushes politics aside, offering Macron a positive coda to a bruising second term that saw him lose his majority in parliament, face mass protests and sink to his lowest-ever approval rating.

“Nowadays, there are few moments where our country is able to unite,” said Olive, who worked as a sports journalist before being elected to the National Assembly in 2022. “Society has changed, and I’d say that the pandemic has had an impact, the Middle East has had an impact, and the war in Ukraine has had an impact. Compared to these human tragedies, football really does take a back seat — it’s a distant second, third, or fourth priority.”

Winning in harmony

Les Bleus weren’t always a national unifier.

As more and more children of immigrant descent joined the team in the 1990s, it became a convenient whipping post for far-right provocateurs like Jean-Marie Le Pen, the founder of France’s main far-right party, which is now called the National Rally. Le Pen said in 1996 it was “artificial to bring in players from abroad and call them the French national team.”

But the team’s racial makeup was a point of pride when France won its first-ever World Cup two years later. The squad embodied the black-blanc-beur generation, with Black, white and Arab French citizens living — and winning — in harmony.

Famed French-Moroccan comedian Jamel Debbouze famously joked that star player Zinédine Zidane, who is of Algerian descent, had “abolished racism for 48 hours” after scoring twice to defeat Brazil 3-0.

Then-President Jacques Chirac, who had been a visible supporter of the squad, saw his popularity rise in the wake of the win. One poll showed his approval rating jump 11 percentage points in the World Cup’s aftermath.

France’s football success in recent years has fueled the team’s popularity and made it politically risky to go after the country’s footballers — even for the far right. It also gave Macron an opportunity to forge his own relationship with the national team.

Jean-Baptiste Guégan, an expert on the geopolitics of sports who teaches at the prestigious Sciences Po university, said the team gave Macron — who initially presented himself as a disruptive political outsider — a way to highlight his own “dynamism, vitality, youthfulness, and energy” by associating himself with its players.

From standing on a table with his arms raised during France’s 2018 victory to his much-mocked attempts to console a devastated Mbappé after the 2022 final loss to Argentina, Macron has often been accused of trying to insert himself into the emotional center of France’s football triumphs.

One official who saw the French president during the 2022 World Cup semifinal in Qatar, and who was granted anonymity to speak candidly, said Macron was actively engaged and shouting throughout the match as France faced Morocco.

And it goes beyond football: An exhilarated Macron visibly celebrated when swim star Léon Marchand won at the Paris 2024 Olympics. He confirmed his bro bona fides by downing a beer in one gulp when he crashed the locker room of the winners of France’s rugby championship.

“Macron is probably the French president who has gone the furthest in terms of using sports and his interest in football,” said Guégan. “He has made football a key part of his political messaging.”

Trajectories intertwined

Macron has also increasingly blurred the lines between politics and football, often framing economic and political successes in the language of sporting triumph.

As recently as last week, he posted a graphic inspired by the French national team’s jersey to celebrate France finishing first in the number of foreign direct investment projects for the seventh consecutive year.

Macron’s relationship with France’s current star player, Mbappé, has attracted particular scrutiny. In 2022, the French president went so far as to intervene directly in an effort to convince the player to stay at Paris Saint-Germain rather than join Spanish giant Real Madrid. Mbappé stayed, but eventually signed with Madrid — the club he idolized growing up — two years later.

The two men share striking parallels: meteoric success at a young age — Mbappé won the World Cup as a teenager while Macron became France’s youngest-ever president — intense media scrutiny and a tendency to trigger controversy with blunt public remarks. Mbappé has also publicly spoken out against the French far right.

“Macron and Mbappé’s trajectories have become intertwined,” Guégan said. “If Mbappé wins another World Cup before Macron leaves office, it will inevitably become part of the story Macron tells about his presidency too.”

Like Macron, the last few years have been rough for Mbappé. His former club, Paris Saint-Germain, won the UEFA Champions League — European club football’s most prestigious trophy — twice after his departure, while he has struggled to amass silverware in Madrid.

And like Macron, Mbappé needs a big international win to forget about the daily troubles he faces back home.