Maduro yesterday acceptable, today undesirable: diplomatic doublespeak and the moral bankruptcy of Macron

Following the kidnapping of Nicolás Maduro, the French president did not hesitate to publicly rejoice over X, affirming that “the Venezuelan people are today rid of the dictatorship of Nicolás Maduro”. He accused the Venezuelan leader of having “confiscated power” and “trampled on fundamental freedoms”, posing, once again, as a moral prosecutor on the international scene. These words, heavy with condemnation, nevertheless sound strange when we confront them with the reality of recent events. Because in 2022, Emmanuel Macron was not a dictatorship slayer when he met Nicolás Maduro in the cozy corridors of COP27, in Sharm el-Sheikh. A short video, which has gone viral, shows the two men exchanging smiles and pleasantries. The French president even proposes to “engage in bilateral work useful for the region”, before ensuring that he will recall his Venezuelan counterpart. At the time, not a word about “dictatorship”, even less about an alleged moral indignity.

When Macron denounced Maduro… after courting him

Emmanuel Macron publicly rejoiced on X about the kidnapping of Nicolás Maduro, calling him a dictator who had seized power.
He posed himself as a defender of freedoms and a moral judge on the international scene.… pic.twitter.com/hThaxq7LWM

— Oumma.com (@oumma) January 5, 2026

The diplomacy of the law of the strongest

This contrast is not anecdotal. He says a lot about a Macronian diplomacy which willingly wraps itself in great principles, but puts them away as soon as they become binding. Above all, it reveals a de facto adherence to a brutal vision of international relations, where law gives way to force and where unilateralism becomes a legitimate method of political action. By welcoming an extrajudicial kidnapping, Emmanuel Macron is not content with judging a hated leader: he is endorsing an emblematic practice of Trumpian diplomacy, based on coercion, fait accompli and assumed contempt for international legal frameworks.

Because beyond the judgment passed on Nicolás Maduro, a fundamental question is carefully evacuated by the Élysée: that of international law. Can we rejoice in the kidnapping of a head of state, even an authoritarian one, without undermining the very principles that France claims to defend? Can we applaud an operation carried out outside any legal framework, without an international mandate, without judicial procedure, without multilateral control, without opening the way to a dangerous normalization of arbitrariness?

On this point, the silence from Paris is deafening. No reminder to respect the sovereignty of Venezuela. No condemnation of an act which, in other circumstances, would have been characterized as a serious violation of international law. No reference to diplomatic or judicial mechanisms supposed to govern relations between States. As if political violence becomes acceptable when it is exercised against a leader deemed illegitimate by Western powers.

This posture reveals a Macronian constant: a universalism with variable geometry, where principles are invoked like slogans and abandoned as soon as they become binding. The same power that brandishes international law when serving its alliances chooses here to look the other way, preferring strategic opportunism to moral coherence. By implicitly validating a logic of geopolitical predation, Emmanuel Macron contributes to trivializing a diplomacy of force, where common rules are no longer foundations, but simple adjustment variables.

By celebrating the violent fall of a leader, Emmanuel Macron is not content with rewriting his own diplomatic history. It contributes to the erosion of an already weakened international order, and legitimizes practices which expose all States, including the weakest, to the law of the strongest. By trampling on principles, we end up destroying what they were supposed to protect. And in this world, it is never the people who win, but brute force, cynicism and arbitrariness.