On Tuesday the French president François Holande dramatically sacked environment minister Delphine Batho after she dared to criticise cuts in her department's budget for 2014. On Thursday, in an extraordinary press conference, Batho hit back hard.
Rejecting a statement from President Hollande's official spokeswoman that she had broken ministerial “collective responsibility” in publicly criticising the cuts, Batho declared: “I have not lacked collective responsibility. I have committed no error or mistake.” Instead the former minister said it was the prime minister Jean-Marc Ayrault who was at fault for changing the rules of the game by making decisions himself on departmental budgets without discussing them with ministers. “The prime minister decide to change the method, something changed in the working of the government.” She then stated: “Collective responsibility in the government, that's over.”
Batho, who says she did not expect to be sacked over her comments, but instead thought they would start a debate, also criticised the government for bowing to powerful commercial energy interests, hinting that this was behind her sacking. “Certain powerful economic interests could not accept the ambitious levels I had fixed for energy transition [editor's note, to renewable energies],' she said, singling out supporters of shale gas exploration and the nuclear power industry.
“These forces did not hide their desire to have my head, but if the government had shown solidarity they would not have succeeded,” she claimed, describing herself now as a “whistleblower for the Left and for the environment”.
Perhaps most extraordinary of all, she pointed the finger at the head of a firm, Vallourec, which is involved in the shale gas market in France, whom she said seemed to know that she was about to lose her job. “Is it normal that the boss of the company Vallourec, which is directly interested in exploiting shale gas, was able to announce that I was being marginalised, weeks in advance, to his company executives in the USA?” she asked. “What information did he have to be so sure of himself?”
The chief executive officer in question is Philippe Crouzet, whose wife Sylvie Hubac is the director of President Hollande's office.
There is no doubt that Batho, who cut an isolated figure at her lone press conference, paid a heavy price for her decision on RTL radio on Tuesday morning to criticise what she called a “bad budget” for 2014. This involves a cut of 7% or 500 million euros lopped off the environment ministry's budget of 7.6 billion euros, and a loss of 1093 jobs. This is the deepest cut suffered by any minister, with EELV minister Cécile Duflot, who is in charge of housing and the regions, coming a close second.
“We're at a stage when the French people have doubts, where...there is disappointment with regard to the government, there is a doubt about our willingness to change,” Batho said. She hoped that “in the days to come we can show that the desire to make France the nation of environmental excellence, of energy transition [editor's note, to renewable energies], is not something that's expendable”.
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The clear criticism she expressed – which has been described by some as “political suicide” - had not, though, led to her immediate dismissal. According to reports, President Hollande called the environment minister to ask her to recant and apologise. When she refused the president and the prime minister decided they had no choice but to get rid of Batho. “At the suggestion of the prime minister, the president of the Republic has put an end to the role of Madame Delphine Batho,” was the laconic statement from the Elysée Palace. The official government spokeswoman Najat Vallaud-Belkacem said on Wednesday that the president considered the minister had broken the important principle of collective responsibility that applies to government members.
Batho's comments at her press conference brought a predictably tough reaction from the government and its supporters. On a visit to Tunisia, President Hollande himself was careful to avoid the French press corps to spare him from commenting. But his entourage was less inhibited, with one aide describing her remarks as a “stab in the back”. One claimed: “We were all quite shocked. She is trying to justify her sacking by creating a lofty story around it. The truth is she made a mistake and one has to be accountable for one's mistakes.” As for the attacks on the prime minister, the aide said they were “very tough and unjustified”.
Meanwhile the head of the Socialist party group in the Senate François Rebsamen said Batho's remarks were “unacceptable”. He said he preferred to think the comments were was because she was tired, overworked and disappointed rather than that “guided by a desire to settle scores, Delphine Batho now wants to fight an inappropriate personal battle against her own camp”.
For Hollande and Ayrault, the sacking was above all an act of authority, in the face of criticism of their lack of toughness coming from members of their own party and certain media commentators whose views apparently obsess the Elysée. “This will reinforce the authority of Ayrault and Hollande, that's for sure,” said one contented minister who is a Hollande loyalist. “You cannot play solo in a government, you're in a team!”
It is certainly true that some months ago a number of senior figures in the ruling Socialist Party urged the president and prime minister to make an example of someone. At the time, that was deemed out of the question. But since then there has been the explosive Cahuzac affair, and the government has been trying to get a grip on the levers of power while its popularity has been falling inexorably in the opinion polls.
Nonetheless, on Tuesday morning few in the party had expected Batho to be sacked for her comments. “That's her job, I'm not going to attack her,” the spokeswoman for the PS at the National Assembly Annick Lepetit said just after the minister’s criticism of her departmental budget. Her MP colleague Thierry Mandon said, again before news of the sacking came through, that Batho was “right to fight to get a little more money” for her ministry.
Then came the dismissal, and with it the message from the government that no minister would now be permitted to question the government’s attempts to reduce the budget deficit. Even if this risks making the government look authoritarian, with no guarantee that this will make the policy any more legitimate politically.
'A casting error'
As for Delphine Batho's performance at the ministry of the environment, this had met with far from unanimous approval. Mediapart has established that the minister, who was ill at ease on her arrival in the job, had stayed in the background, suffered several setbacks and earned the mistrust of some environmental groups. One minister described her appointment there as a “casting error”, recalled how ministerial “papers were sent flying” and spoke of “the people she never greeted” at the regular Wednesday meetings of ministers with the president.
Batho was once a close ally – a protégée even – of Ségolène Royal, the socialist candidate at the 2007 presidential elections and president of the Poitou-Charentes region in west France. But the pair reportedly fell out when Batho refused to give up her parliamentary constituency in that region in favour of Royal for the 2012 parliamentary elections.
Batho did not have many allies inside the government itself, and nor was she seen as a heavyweight in the PS, where she does not have the same roots as some of her colleagues. Her political background was in the anti-racist group SOS-Racisme. The daughter of working class parents, Batho also had fewer academic qualifications than most of her ministerial colleagues,with just the baccalauréat to her name.The sacking of a relatively isolated minister who had no major allies in government or support base in the PS does not, therefore, reinforce the idea that her sacking was a tough act of authority. Critics point out that while Batho was fired for defending her department, senior ministers such as Arnaud Montebourg have remained in office despite criticising the prime minister.
The UMP candidate to be mayor of Paris in 2014, Nathalie Kosciusko-Morizet, picked up on this theme, saying the dismissal of the environmental minister said “a great deal about François Hollande's personality”. She said: “It's easy to be tough with the weak and weak with the tough.”
The prominent MEP Daniel Cohn-Bendit, who founded Europe Écologie, attacked what he called the “macho” attitude of the French government, also contrasting the treatment meted out to Nicole Bricq and Delphine Batho and the “paternalistic” handling of Arnaud Montebourg. “It's really strange that two women [get] sacked while a Montebourg can say the most insane things in the world and no one says anything to him. Because he's a man, because he's macho and you don't touch him,” said Cohn-Bendit.
Ironically, Batho's public criticism of the reduced environmental budget won her the backing of many environmentalists who up to now had not been convinced by her performance at the ministry. Many were also quick to pursue Cohn-Bendit's line that after Nicole Bricq had been dropped from the department in June 2012, for raising questing marks over drilling permits for oil giant Shell in the overseas region of French Guiana, now it was the turn of her successor to get fired. “Bricq, Batho, it's only environment ministers who get the sack in this government, and quicker than [former budget minister Jérôme] Cahuzac. Incomprehension,” tweeted the EELV spokesman Jean-Philippe Magnen.
Green MP Sergio Coronado stated: “It was a very swift removal, I conclude from it that the environment is not one of the president’s priorities.” EELV MEP Karima Delli said: “Two environment ministers sacked in two years by [the prime minister's official office] Matignon; bad methods accompanied by a bad environmental policy.” And Nicolas Hulot, the TV personality and high-profile green activist who in December was named by Hollande as “The president of the Republic’s special envoy for the protection of the planet”, also expressed misgivings about the sacking. “To be honest it's not good news in as far as [Batho is] someone who has really, really worked, and learnt a lot. At a time when she has, I think, quite a rational perception of what's at stake, she's leaving us.”
On the evening following the sacking EELV ministers Cécile Duflot and Pascal Canfin, parliamentarians and senior officials held an emergency meeting to discuss the affair and their continuing place in the ruling parliamentary majority. The EELV senator Jean-Vincent Placé had already raised the stakes before the meeting, telling BFM-TV that his party could not vote for the 2014 budget because of the cuts at the environment ministry. “Given the current state of things, one can't vote for the budget...when you don't vote for the budget, you're no longer in the [ruling] majority. We're close to leaving.” The green MEP and former minister Yves Cochet even called for the EELV to “leave this government” immediately.
However, the EELV national secretary Pascal Durand backed the line that the movement should stay in government, believing that Batho's departure gives them an opportunity to win concessions on environmental issues, and at a time when crucial discussions on environmental taxes as part of the 2014 budget legalisation are beginning. It is a view supported by the EELV ministers Canfin and Duflot. Instead the EELV leaders have contented themselves with demanding “actions” from the government on environmental issues, without spelling out exactly what those measures should be.
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English version by Michael Streeter