Discreet, sharp, serious and sometimes frighteningly blunt – that is how most political analysts describe 52-year-old Alexis Kohler, Emmanuel Macron’s long-time chief of staff.
For the past eight years, he has occupied the corner office on the first floor of the Élysée Palace, just two doors down from the nation’s leader, and has proved to be the most loyal and efficient of gatekeepers.
In the summer of 2024, when the EU’s former Brexit negotiator Michel Barnier had the post of French prime minister in his sights (which he would go on to hold between September 5 and December 13) he reportedly first had to convince Kohler before he could be granted a one-on-one with the president.
“Everything that concerns the president has to go through him first, he wouldn’t miss a comma,” Emery Doligé, author of “Les Invisibles de l’Élysée” (the invisibles of the Élysée), told FRANCE 24 in a 2022 interview. “He’s the one who decides whether information needs to be passed on to the president or not.”
Co-authored coup
Kohler has also often jokingly been referred to as Macron’s “twin” and “second brain” and is said to have played a role in essentially every important decision that the French leader has taken since embarking on his first mandate back in 2017 – from the Yellow Vest protests and the Covid-19 pandemic, to the implementation of the contested pension reform, and France’s stance on the wars in Ukraine and Gaza.
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“Pragmatic and level-headed, the five-years-older Kohler was the one who translated Emmanuel Macron’s sometimes hazardous ‘political impulses’ into actual public policies,” Le Monde’s political journalist Nathalie Segaunes wrote in a piece analysing the pair’s working relationship.
But the Kohler and Macron duo go back much further than that. According to French media, the two met sometime around 2012, when Kohler worked for the economy ministry and Macron joined then-president François Hollande’s team as a senior adviser. As Macron climbed the ranks, and was appointed economy minister in 2014, he took on Kohler as his chief of staff, resulting in an even closer working relationship.
In 2016, Macron’s shock decision to suddenly resign from Hollande’s government to challenge his boss in the presidential race, was a plan that Kohler had helped him develop. Since then, the pair have been more or less inseparable.
“Macron’s inner circle is Kohler. Period. There’s no one else,” a source familiar with their working relationship told Le Figaro. According to the paper, the president once even admitted that he found Kohler more intelligent than himself.
Prefers the shadows
But Kohler’s time at the Élysée Palace has not always been plain sailing.
In 2018, he was subjected to a rough Senate hearing in the so-called Benalla Affair. The scandal involved a Macron bodyguard who had been caught beating up protesters in the guise of a police officer.
Kohler, who much prefers working in the shadows, hated the public attention it brought.
Also in 2018, investigative news site Mediapart revealed that Kohler had undisclosed family ties to the Italian Aponte family, which owns the global Mediterranean Shipping Company (MSC) – a company for which he, during his time as a senior civil servant, had allegedly been involved in making decisions for.
The revelations led to the prosecutors launching an investigation into a suspected conflict of interest, but the charges were dropped a year later, having found no evidence of any wrongdoing.
In 2020, an investigation was reopened into the matter, and he is now under formal investigation for an alleged conflict of interest. That case is still ongoing.
And just this week, Kohler was due to testify in the Senate in the “Nestlé Affair”. The case involves France’s top mineral water brands who, among other allegations, stand accused of using illegal purification methods in their “natural” bottled waters. According to the Senate inquiry committee, the French presidency – and especially Kohler – had long been aware of the cheating but let it slide.
Kohler refused to appear in the Senate hearing, even though he is obliged to do so by law, citing “the separation of powers”.
According to Le Figaro, Kohler recently also turned down the opportunity to head a large state-owned company because he would first have to be grilled by lawmakers.
“He had sworn to never go through all that again,” a person in his entourage told the newspaper.
‘It was good’
His mid-April departure, after which he will join French banking giant Société Générale as executive vice president, shocks few who are familiar with his strong aversion to the spotlight.
But he will be sorely missed by his former boss, with whom he saw six prime ministers and almost 200 ministers come and go in the corridors of the Élysée.
“For more than 10 years by my side […] Kohler poured his energy, talent and extraordinary work ethic into our political project and into serving the French people. He served our country in an exemplary way over those years. I know how much we owe him,” Macron commented on his exit.
Kohler summed up his tenure as Macron’s closest confidante in his own laconic way: “It was good. Very good even.”
Philippe Grangeon, a former Macron adviser, was more emotional in his description, telling Le Monde that the duo’s split is sure to leave both of them with “dizzying sadness”.
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