Late on Friday the French Prime Minister’s office announced it was sacking its two leading public relations directors and creating a new “communications pole”, to be headed by a high-flying executive from the multinational advertising and PR group Publicis, revealing a growing malaise within government at PM Jean-Marc Ayrault’s failure to impose himself on the public stage.
Both Ayrault and President François Hollande have seen their popularity ratings steadily plummet over recent months and which, beyond the inevitable effects of the deepening economic crisis, has been widely interpreted as, at least in part, caused by a perceived lack of decisive leadership.
Hollande appeared to try to address that criticism in an interview Thursday evening on French television channel France 2, when, with carefully-scripted answers, he repeatedly spoke of himself as the leader of government policies, to the extent that Prime Minister Ayrault’s name was never once pronounced.
Ayrault has suffered a series of embarrassing blunders, with ministers making key announcements ahead of him, while others have confusingly contradicted him in public, and his own presentations have been slammed as lackluster and confusing (like this one, announcing measures to encourage business performance).
Ayrault, 63, a former secondary school teacher of German who has an austere and professorial manner of speaking, has until now written his speeches alone. During parliament’s debate earlier this month over the conservative opposition’s failed attempt to carry a vote of no confidence in the government, one socialist Member of Parliament, who did not wish to be named, commented that “he is inaudible whatever he says”.
Less than 24 hours after Hollande’s TV appearance on Thursday, Ayrault’s office announced “a reorganization” of staff with a new PR team appointed to handle the prime minister’s “strategy, public relations, press relations, social media, speeches and studies”.
His PR director until then, Dominique Bouissou, formerly head of PR for the Socialist Party, along with Bernard Candiard, a PR consultant brought in last autumn, were sacked and replaced by Jérôme Batout, from Publicis.
Batout, 33, until now an associate director of Publicis, where he served as a senior advisor to CEO Maurice Lévy, has an unusual background in the world of PR. With a doctorate in philosophy and in social sciences, he has worked as an analyst in mergers and acquisitions for the Crédit Suisse bank based in London, and was for five years a professor of finance at the London School of Economics.
He has a long relationship with the Socialist Party, having served between 2004 and 2006 as a member of Hollande’s staff when the latter was general secretary of the party, then as a senior member of the party’s planning team for the 2007 presidential elections, and was subsequently appointed as deputy general secretary of the party, a post he kept until 2009.
A source close to Ayrault, a longstanding ally of the prime minister who asked not to be named, told Mediapart that whatever the questions raised over what some see as an odd choice for his new spin doctor, it at least demonstrated that Hollande has no intention of replacing Ayrault in the short term.
-------------------------
English version by Graham Tearse