France's Macron opens up about love to autistic interviewers

LE PECQ, France (AP) — The question for France's president about his teenage romance with a teacher at his high school was so close to the bone, so eye-popping in a country where politicians largely keep their private lives to themselves, that the interviewer couldn't quite rustle up the courage to ask it.

So he got Emmanuel Macron to pose it to himself.

“He is the president," the French leader said, reading the question out loud from a piece of paper his interviewer handed to him.

“He should set the example and not marry his teacher.”

Ouch.

A group of interviewers on the autism spectrum, described by their publication as “atypical journalists,” got France's 45-year-old president to talk about himself with unusual and illuminating candor in a televised interview this weekend, with frank but fair no-filter questions that professional journalists mostly don't dare ask of the French leader.

The interviewers from Le Papotin, a journal founded in 1990 in a Paris-region day care center for young people with autism, playfully grilled Macron about his marriage to Brigitte, his friends (he said he doesn't have many), Russian President Vladimir Putin and other matters in his heart and thoughts.

In the process, they winkled out some remarkably intimate details and gave Macron a platform to show a more personal side at a critical juncture in his second term as president. His government is embarking on a high-risk effort to push back France's retirement age, a promised reform of the pension system that is infuriating critics and threatens to bring protesters onto the streets.

Le Papotin's interviewers have over the years questioned numerous people of note, including former Presidents Jacques Chirac and Nicolas Sarkozy, and actor Vincent Cassel ("Ocean’s Twelve," “Black Swan”)....