Emmanuel Macron’s road to the presidency may explain his blunt

To anyone else, it might have been a simple photo op with the US President. But to Emmanuel Macron, it was a political opportunity.

Sitting across from Donald Trump, a man defined by chaos and bluster, the French President made a strategic calculation, one he hoped would earn him respect.

With the eyes of the world on the two newly minted presidents in 2017, Macron gripped the ex-Apprentice star’s hands for several seconds, so tightly that his knuckles turned white.

As the pair shook hands aggressively, locking eyes with faces tight and jaws clenched, Macron hoped to show one of the most powerful leaders on earth that he wouldn’t make “small concessions, not even symbolic ones”.

The awkward moment, forever captured on camera, only ended when Trump was finally able to break free.

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Macron would later confess it was an “intentional” move to display his preferred leadership style.

“My handshake with him – it wasn’t innocent,” Macron told a French newspaper after the encounter in 2017.

“It’s not the be-all and the end-all of a policy, but it was a moment of truth.”

That moment of truth has defined Macron’s diplomacy, which observers say has been one of hyper-personalisation and bluntness.

From the start, Macron has sought to rule like Jupiter — “unchallenged and detached from trivialities, like the Roman god of the skies”.

But the day-to-day demands of politics have made that lofty goal hard to reach, especially with his popularity plummeting ahead of a looming election.

And so when an ally turned around and blindsided the leader, a humiliated Macron was eager to find a way to settle the score.

The ambitious outsider

Macron has always been something of an outsider within France’s political establishment.

William Drozdiak, who released a book last year about the French leader’s efforts to shape the future of Europe, says Macron prides himself on the fact that he is not a career politician.

“He had never been elected to any kind of public office before becoming President,” he told the ABC.

“And in a way, that has been part of his problem because he doesn’t have a lot of political experience.”

With a masters in public policy, Macron had been an investment banker before he was recruited to serve as then president Francois Hollande’s deputy chief of staff.

In almost no time at all, he was appointed minister of the economy, going on to make a name for himself over a package of economic measures to open up regulated sectors of the economy.

Dubbed the Macron law, the labour market reforms drove tens of thousands of people to the streets for months of protests across France.

While this divided public opinion on the young politician, Macron’s personal life also captured attention.

His wife, Brigitte Macron, used to be his teacher….