Paris
\nPresident Emmanuel Macron has shrugged off a controversy over a photo of him posing with a bare-chested youth who is giving the middle finger during a trip to French territories in the Caribbean.<\/p>\n
Far-right leader Marine Le Pen said she was \u201cunable to find the words to express our indignation\u201d at the sight of Macron posing with two black youths on Saint Martin island in a snap that has gone viral.<\/p>\n
Macron, who beat Le Pen in last year\u2019s presidential election, on Saturday took a spontaneous trip to the home of one of the youths in the picture, seen wearing a white vest, who had recently left prison after serving time for robbery.<\/p>\n
After telling him to quit crime \u201cyour mother deserves better than that\u201d the 40-year-old French leader posed for a picture with him and his bare-chested friend, who gave the middle finger to the camera.<\/p>\n
Defending the pair, Macron said they had carried a handicapped girl to meet him after the picture was taken.<\/p>\n
They were \u201ccapable of doing that because I showed confidence in them, because I respected them. That\u2019s our republic,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
Macron used the trip to France\u2019s hurricane-hit islands in the Caribbean to spend time with local people and to urge faster reconstruction and the picture could help soften his image after a dramatic fall in the polls recently.<\/p>\n
But it also highlights his sometimes contradictory image-making, which sometimes casts him as a modernising, youthful president, while at other times shows him emphasising the traditions and sobriety of his office.<\/p>\n
He was widely criticised last month after appearing to admonish a 25-year-old gardener who said he was unable to find a job during an open-day at the presidential palace in Paris.<\/p>\n
He was also stern with a shaggy-haired schoolboy in June who addressed him by his nickname \u201cManu\u201d at a ceremony commemorating the French resistance movement during World War II.<\/p>\n
\u201cYou call me Mr President, or you call me sir, ok?\u201d Macron told him in front of the television cameras.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Paris President Emmanuel Macron has shrugged off a controversy over a photo of him posing with a bare-chested youth who is giving the middle finger during a trip to French territories in the Caribbean. Far-right leader Marine Le Pen said she was \u201cunable to find the words to express our indignation\u201d at the sight of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":43541,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[87],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-43540","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-world"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/43540","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=43540"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/43540\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":43542,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/43540\/revisions\/43542"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/43541"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=43540"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=43540"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=43540"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}