French President Emmanuel Macron’s reelection campaign has its own Minecraft server
Features the Palais de l’Élysée and, er, a room filled with boxes
When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission.Here’s how it works.
France’s presidential elections begin in a few days, and as part of his re-election campaign, sitting president Emmanuel Macron has launched his own Minecraft server. Revealedon Twitter, the server features a mixture of rural and urban environments surrounding a recreation of the Palais de l’Élysée, the official residence of the French President.
You can see an overview of the server in the video above. Other notable locations include a recreation of Macron’s campaign office and, uh, a room filled with cardboard boxes. Naturally, the world is plastered with Macron’s campaign slogan “avec vous”, whether that’s on posters adorning the walls, or on a giant banner being dragged across the sky by a prop-plane.
The server isn’t purely an election gimmick, it’s tied to one of Macron’s stated policies, namely his desire to create"a European metaverse"as a way to increase France’s “cultural and informational independence” away from big tech companies like Apple and Google, alongside what the French president refers to as “Anglo-Saxon or Chinese aggregators”.
Obviously there’s a huge gap between a Minecraft server and a Metaverse, but it’s a novel use of Minecraft. It’s also less cringeworthy than I expected, although that could be down more to the sheer ubiquity of Minecraft than anything else. The extent to which a Minecraft server adorned with campaign slogans will help Macron’s election chances is, of course, hard to ascertain. According to Reuters, The sitting President is currently ahead in the polls, but his lead in said polls over Marine Le Pen has decreased in recent weeks.
Ultimately, deploying Minecraft as part of a political campaign isn’t all that surprising. Mojang’s creative megahit gets used for all manner of things these days, frombuilding graphing calculatorstoteaching kidsabout the effects of climate change.
Minecraft seeds: Fresh new worldsMinecraft texture packs: PixelatedMinecraft skins: New looksMinecraft mods: Beyond vanilla
The biggest gaming news, reviews and hardware deals
Keep up to date with the most important stories and the best deals, as picked by the PC Gamer team.
Co-op survival game Icarus is celebrating 153 consecutive weekly updates by giving you a flamethrower and a free weekend
Undead Labs wants to be known for more than just zombies, and State of Decay 3 could mark that changing point with ‘a much greater level of ambition’
Vampire Survivors’ Castlevania DLC map is so big that I keep getting lost, but I’d do it all over again just to have Sonia Belmont’s sonic whip
