Emmanuel Macron and his wife Brigitte spent their first weekend away together in Bormes-les-Mimosas, France, late last month, after the French president was re-elected.
On May 28, President Macron, 44, was seen strolling hand in hand with the French first lady in Bormes-les-Mimosas, south-eastern France, wearing a white René Lacoste polo shirt, black shorts, and sunglasses.
Brigitte, 69, wore a white top with a military green skirt while relaxing on their first holiday since the French presidential election in late April.
Mr Macron won 58.54 percent of the vote, defeating Ms Le Pen, 53, who got 41.46 percent, according to the official figures.
However, his victory over his far-right opponent was narrower than in their previous meeting in 2017, when he won over 66% of the vote, and Le Pen’s performance was the best for the extreme right ever, with 13.2 million people voting for her.
Mr Macron took a brief break from his duties after being re-elected to a second five-year term in April, ahead of parliamentary elections on June 12 and 19 in which his party, recently renamed as Renaissance, will face a challenge from the far right as well as a new leftist alliance led by Jean-Luc Mélenchon.
According to France24, Jean-Luc Mélenchon has stated that he intends to derail Mr Macron’s administration by obtaining the position of prime minister, pushing the president into a power-sharing scenario known in France as ‘cohabitation.’
Mr Mélenchon has built a left-wing alliance in France, unifying around a shared policy platform and fielding a single candidate in each of the country’s 577 constituencies, with his bloc presently polling in a dead heat with Mr Macron’s.
On the international scene, Mr Macron sparked outrage last week when he stated that Vladimir Putin should be allowed a diplomatic departure after his disastrous invasion of Ukraine.
‘We must not humiliate Russia so that the day the fighting stops, we can build a way out through diplomatic channels,’ Mr Macron said in an interview with a group of regional French media.
Mr Macron’s remark prompted Ukraine’s foreign minister to suggest that the alliance should ‘better focus on how to put Russia in its place’ as it ‘humiliates itself.’
Foreign minister Dmytro Kuleba tweeted that ‘calls to avoid humiliation of Russia can only humiliate France and every other country that would call for it’.
In contrast to the United Kingdom and the United States, Mr. Macron has kept an open line of communication with the Kremlin.
Since the conflict in Ukraine began, the French president claims he has spoken with Russian President Vladimir Putin for roughly 100 hours.