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Un tweet de Macron: "À vous, agriculteurs qui, partout en France, avez lutté sans relâche, nuit après nuit, pour protéger les fruits de votre travail, je veux vous dire notre soutien plein et entier dans ce combat. Tenez bon ! Nous sommes à vos côtés et le resterons."

Pourquois "le resterons" et pas "y resterons"? Il parle d'un endroit, pas une chose.

La phrase entière serait : 'Nous sommes à vos côtés et nous resterons à vos côtés'. Ce qui est important est qu'ici, 'à vos côtés' ne transmet pas l'idée d'un lieu précis mais se traduirait plutôt par 'Nous allons vous soutenir, nous serons toujours soutenants envers vous'. 'A vos côtés' fonctionne quasiment comme un adjectif qualificatif dans la phrase de Macron.

Pour faire le discours plus court, les adjectifs qualificatifs peuvent être remplacés par le pronom 'le' (invariable), ce qui donne 'nous le resterons' (autre exemple 'Je suis fier et je le serai toujours') mais c'est un usage assez littéraire si je ne me trompe pas.

Maybe it's a bit risky for me to quibble with the language of a native speaker like M. Macron and the excellent answer from AroAro, but if Macron indicates that he intends to be at a specific location in the foreseeable future shouldn't he then use "y"? There are no adjectives in the immediate neighbourhood which refer to him and his cohorts, so "le" must refer to the situation and his intended meaning as a whole - and while that isn't impossible it seems like a somewhat clumsy way to formulate a vague general reference. The main excuse for NOT saying "y" is that he doesn't intend to be sitting physically near any farmer in the near future, so he deliberately chose a more abstract formulation.

But Macron probably says/writes so many things that there always will be something somewhere which someone might object to. I also noticed that he use "dire" instead of "promettre" - which reminds me of de Gaulle's famous dictum to the blackfeet of Algeria: "Je vous ai entendu" (or something like that). He didn't promise anything.

AroAro wrote:Pour faire le discours plus court, les adjectifs qualificatifs peuvent être remplacés par le pronom 'le' (invariable), ce qui donne 'nous le resterons' (autre exemple 'Je suis fier et je le serai toujours') mais c'est un usage assez littéraire si je ne me trompe pas.

I believe in this case it's not an adjectif but a syntagme prépositionnel which can be replaced by le or y but since 'à vos côtés' has a sense of location I'm surprised he didn't use y. I'm not actually sure if it's more literary or not, Le Bon Usage doesn't say anything about the register here.

I'm not sure if this is actually true or not but I feel like le would be more natural in some situations, for example, Q. "est-il à vos côtés?" R. "non, il ne l'est pas".

"Y" sounds less abstract and more like he's literally sitting at their side - but really both are fine