The French Government and President Emmanuel Macron himself have been torn apart by the long internal conflict experienced in Le Journal du Dimanche (JDD), one of the biggest political and journalistic controversies of recent years. The editorial staff of the Sunday newspaper, founded in 1948, went on strike for almost six weeks as a protest against the appointment of a new director, Geoffroy Lejeune, with far-right ideas and very close to the former candidate for the Elysee Éric Zemmour.
At the heart of the Government and Macron’s party, Renaissance, it caused great irritation that the new Secretary of State for the City, the deputy of Marseille Sabrina Agresti-Roubache, who sits in the Council of Ministers and is very close to Macron and his wife, Brigitte, gave a long interview to the JDD in the first issue after the strike ended, which came out as a surprise on Sunday.
Many colleagues of Agresti-Roubache in the Government and Deputies of Renaixement considered it very inappropriate that he lent himself to normalizing the JDD after the serious contention with the editorial staff, and more so considering that the Sunday issue came out thanks to the col collaboration with external journalists of the same political line as the director. In principle, the newspaper was to reappear only in the digital version. At the last minute, and despite having fewer pages than usual and a few errors, Lejeune managed to get it on newsstands to make a splash and show that he had won the game. On the front page it placed a public safety issue and published an open letter to Macron allegedly written by families of victims of the violence. It was a real political manifesto about the line that the JDD will adopt, a clear example of why the journalists engaged in such a tough battle.
Agresti-Roubache did not, it seems, have the approval of the Prime Minister, Élisabeth Borne, to speak to the Sunday. Various media have confirmed that the Secretary of State has received a reprimand.
During the JDD crisis, the Government’s discretion and Macron’s silence surprised, although a legislative initiative was launched with broad support in the Assembly to shield the right of media editorial offices to give consent to a new director, a law that will arrive late for the JDD. The background of the problem is the purchase by the Vivendi group, of the billionaire Vincent Bolloré, which has already printed a very right-wing bias in other media.
