First Lady?

It must have been tempting for a victorious President Macron to reward his wife with an official status of First Lady but in the end he resisted and did the right thing.

In return for much hard work expected of her (greeting dignitaries, shaking hands with the public, answering hundreds of letters and being a well-dressed sidekick) she gets nothing: no job title, no official status and no salary. That is how it should be in a democracy: only those who win elections become paid employees of the state, not their family.

For the next five years she will live in the spotlight, admired, envied and criticised and always trying to strike a balance between discreet invisibility and political show-womanship. We must assume she knew what she was doing when her husband put his name forward to be head of state.