Following Le Figaro’s rantings against French President Emmanuel Macron for trying to have an independent view from the U.S. on Franco-Chinese relations, it was Le Monde on May 8, which went ballistic over the “surprising presence of France’s Ambassador Pierre Levy at Russian President Vladimir Putin’s inauguration … without coordination with its main European partners, at a time of extreme tension with Russia.” Macron made the decision in the wake of Xi Jinping’s Paris visit, at which he had told the Chinese President that he was not in favor of war against Russia or the Russian people; and just as Putin had ordered a maneuver of Moscow’s tactical nuclear weapons.
Le Monde listed four reasons against Macron’s decision for Levy to attend the May 7 inauguration: The first reason was that Putin’s election took place “in such undemocratic conditions.… Alexei Navalny had died a month earlier in prison, in mid-February, in conditions that have never been clarified.” The second was that “The vast majority of Western countries boycotted the ceremony. Apart from France, no G7 country was represented. As for the European Union (EU) countries, the French ambassador was accompanied only by his colleagues from Hungary, Slovakia—whose complacency towards Moscow is well known—Malta, Cyprus and Greece.
“The third reason is that, the day before the inauguration ceremony, the same French ambassador had been summoned to the Russian Foreign Ministry, for the third time since the beginning of 2024, to be reproached for the ‘provocative’ policy of the French authorities.” What Le Monde dismisses as “provocative policy” is to Macron’s reaffirming his threat to send French troops to Ukraine to fight Russia, in his April 29 interview with The Economist.
