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.”