Always keen to appear on unexpected media to boost his flagging popularity, French president Emmanuel Macron happened to chat on TikTok with a ‘private individual’ about a trivial administrative matter—without realising that the person he was talking to was a notorious Islamist influencer.
It all started a few days ago with a video posted on Tiktok by a man complaining that he had been fined at a motorway toll booth for using his phone to pay at the terminal. Facing the camera, he recounted his experience a few days earlier near Tours: having just paid his toll with his phone, he learnt that he had been fined €90 and had three points taken off his driving licence because he had violated highway code which forbids holding your phone in your hand at toll booths or red lights.
The video, viewed hundreds of thousands of times, went so viral that it eventually reached the ears of Macron, who took the time to respond to it in the same tone, on TikTok, in a short video taken in selfie mode. “I think that by 2025, you should be able to pay tolls using your phone. I’ve passed the file on to the interior minister and we’re going to sort it out collectively. Thank you for the alert,” said the head of state in simplistic French, in a tone intended to be ‘cool’ and relaxed.
Interior Minister Bruno Retailleau has since confirmed that he has received the order and intends to respond positively to the president’s request.
This is not the first time that the president has played this little game of using social media to boost his image among young people—with varying degrees of success. The anecdote would be insignificant if observers had not looked at the profile of Macron’s interlocutor. Far from being just another young person, the TikTok user is in fact an Islamist influencer of the type that Bruno Retailleau has been trying to hunt down and even expel for several weeks.
Paul Sugy, a journalist at Le Figaro, reveals that the influencer, known as S4iintt on Tiktok, has no fewer than 250,000 followers to whom he preaches a version of Islam close to that advocated by the Muslim Brotherhood.
In his videos, he explains that he wants to “bash heads” when he sees women dressed too lightly. To this Tiktoker, with whom the President wastes time talking because of his obsession with communication, France is an “Islamophobic state.” He promotes the niqab (full veil) and goes so far as to defend the wearing of the veil by young girls from the age of seven.
And this is not happening in an isolated video. His recurring videos have all the hallmarks of radical preaching. He attacks Muslims who listen to music because it makes them guilty of “billions of sins.” In another video, he extols the merits of polygamy—with the caveat that it might sometimes be expensive to support several wives.
In this case, the scandalous amateurism of the president and his communication unit can only dismay. No one in Macron’s entourage saw fit to curb his enthusiasm, to dissuade him from posting his little video, or to learn more about a man who, in another of his TikTok videos, describes Macron as “a dwarf who is married to his French teacher and who runs a country the size of a crisp.” The embarrassment is total. Now that Macron has compromised himself with this man, how can he back down without losing face? What credibility can his interior minister have—he who has also plunged headlong into this pitiful ambush?
Only Le Figaro and some right-wing commentators on X have taken up the story. The mainstream press has cautiously stuck to the issue of tolls and telephone payments: that’s obviously less dangerous.