Our political system encourages that. We don't have proportional representation. There's little renewal in our political class and it's always the same faces. There's also a lack of morals - it's one affair after the other. A system like that cannot be successful.

I am a strong believer that modern political life must rediscover a sense for symbolism. We need to develop a kind of political heroism. I don't mean that I want to play the hero. But we need to be amenable once again to creating grand narratives.

Our children and grandchildren visit us regularly in the Élysée Palace . The little ones are constantly running around outside in the garden. The first time they were intimidated by this place, but now they move around here totally normally. I think it is important that people really live in this place.

I think our responsibility as political leaders today, is to push our economic leaders to change their investment behavior, to decide new things, and to help workers to change their jobs. And I think the mistake that Donald Trump decided to make is exactly the mistake we made in France and in Europe. Which was to resist to the change in order to protect the old jobs. What we have to protect is people, not jobs. If you want to protect people, you retrain them.

I thoroughly believe that reading and literature can help a society to better understand itself.

What we learn from the past is that you cannot make peace against people by interfering and - and just launching a war and trying to change a regime without any political solution. So my role is first to avoid any war and try to - to frame the discussion in order to create peace and have a comprehensive peace process and preserve unintelligible and especially in this Middle East region. That's what I tried to do in Lebanon, for instance, by negotiating both with M.B.S., with the Lebanese government.

Donald Trump is the head of a global power.