Emmanuel Macron’s one-man diplomacy

In profile, he looks a bit like Emmanuel Macron. Same antique straight nose, same height, same look. His official title: “Special envoy for Libya.” Hardly anyone knows his name. Paul Soler, 45, a former special forces soldier, is one of the most secretive advisors at the Elysée, where he is hardly ever present, busy traveling as he is. In truth, he is much more than that: a sort of personal diplomat to the president.

His missions stretch from North Africa to the Sahel region of West Africa, but also as far as Ukraine and Russia, Côte d’Ivoire, the Central African Republic, Syria and Iraq. They involve traveling to sensitive areas, aiding the opposition of enemy states and playing up what’s left of French influence in Africa, outside the usual circuits of the French Foreign Affairs Ministry. “Ok, fire!” says the president whenever he launches the former serviceman from the 13^th Parachute Dragoon Regiment on a delicate diplomatic mission. Soler is one of those “out of the box” types, as the young “start-up nation” men used to say, in the early days of Macronism, to describe those non-conformist profiles Macron is so fond of. He reports only to the “chief,” as he calls the president, whom he has known for 10 years.

In the autumn of 2023, France was discreetly trying to get medicine to the hostages – several of them French – held in Gaza after Hamas’s terrorist incursion into Israel on October 7 of that year. “Mr. Paul,” as he is sometimes called, set his atypical networks in motion. Medical aid had to be transported via Doha, Cairo and Rafah, using the Red Cross and contacts within Hamas. Soler was still in the loop when Mia Schem, a 21-year-old French-Israeli binational kidnapped during the attack on the Tribe of Nova music festival on October 7, was freed. One-to-one, discreet, efficient: In short, the diplomacy Macron secretly dreams of.

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