It was after weeks of rumour over an impending government reshuffle that Édouard Philippe, who served three years as France’s prime minister ever since the election of Emmanuel Macron as president in May 2017, was replaced on Friday by Jean Castex, a senior civil servant, largely unknown to the public, who most recently played a key role in coordinating preparations for the gradual lifting in May of the shutdown measures introduced to contain the Covid-19 virus epidemic.
A graduate of the elite administration school ENA, Castex, 55, who until Friday was a member of the conservative Les Républicains (LR) party, notably previously served, between 2011 and 2012, as deputy secretary general at the Élysée Palace, the French presidential office, during the final year of Nicolas Sarkozy’s term as president.
Already under Macron’s centre-right administration, Castex was in September 2017 appointed as head of an inter-ministerial department for the organisation of the Olympic and Paralympic games to be held in Paris in 2024.
A father of four, Castex is also mayor of Prades, a small municipality close to the eastern foothills of the Pyrenees, in south-west France, the region of his family roots, where he was re-elected for a third term in March with 75.7% of votes cast.
Considered by some as being a socially minded conservative, what in Britain is called one-nation conservatism, he is nevertheless also regarded as having been more budgetary than socially minded when serving as a senior member of France’s national auditing body, the Cours des comptes. Between 2005 and 2006, he was the director of the health ministry administration for hospital and healthcare management (the DHOS), when he played a key role in preparing a reform aimed at reining in spending and setting financial targets for hospitals, and which has been accused of being one of the early reasons behind the current crisis of under-staffing and equipment shortages in the French hospital system.
The appointment of Castex, who served as chief of staff to conservative health minister Xavier Bertrand between 2006 and 2007, and then as Bertrand’s chief of staff from 2007-2008 when the latter was labour minister, appeared to confirm that Macron has no plans to shift the political orientation of his soon-to-be-announced new government from that led by Philippe who, like Castex, came from the conservative LR party. “The day after will be to the Right like the day before,” commented Parti socialiste (PS) leader Olivier Faure in a post on Twitter.
Enlargement : Illustration 1
It was after several weeks of prevarication that Macron chose Castex to succeed Philippe, who on Sunday formally took up his position as mayor of the northern port town of Le Havre, his political fiefdom, following municipal elections last Sunday. Despite being forced to stand down from the LR party after his appointment as Macron’s prime minister, Philippe, 49, has never joined the president’s ruling La République en marche (LREM) party.
Castex’s profile, a markedly more technocratic figure than Philippe, demonstrates how Macron foresees taking sole charge of government policy over the coming last two years of his five-year term, with his prime minister transformed into a simple executant. Evidence of this is the appointment as chief of staff to Castex of Nicolas Revel, who Macron had already attempted in 2017 to place in the same job under Philippe (the latter had refused and instead appointed his friend Benoît Ribadeau-Dumas).
Revel, a senior civil servant like Castex, and who, like Castex was a deputy secretary general at the Élysée – in Revel’s case under the presidency of François Hollande – was latterly head of the national public healthcare insurance fund (la Caisse nationale de l’assurance maladie). He had been rumoured on several occasions as a likely replacement to Macron’s troubled secretary general of the Élysée, Alexis Kohler, and Revel’s nomination now to the prime minister’s office comes as confirmation of the French president’s tightening of control.
In an interview he gave jointly to a number of regional French dailies and published last Thursday, one day before the appointment of Castex, Macron had insisted that he wanted to change nothing in the political “course” he had set in 2017. Sidestepping a question about an eventual reform of the 35-hour fulltime working week, he did however confirm that he was intent on relaunching his reform of the pension system which was interrupted by the coronavirus epidemic and which had met with determined opposition from trades unions.
Speaking in sufficiently vague terms to keep the suspense, he also paid tribute to the “remarkable work” of Édouard Philippe, then still his prime minister of three years. “We have a relationship of confidence that is, from a certain point of view, unique in the scale of the Fifth Republic,” said Macron. “I will have to make choices to lead the new path,” he added, hinting at the end of a cycle.
In May, the French president prompted a flurry of rumours in ministerial corridors after announcing, in reference to the aftermath to the virus crisis that had finally begun subsiding, “Let’s know, at this time, how to step off the beaten track, of ideologies, to reinvent ourselves, and me the first”. Many among his supporters were arguing for a change of prime minister as the only concrete demonstration of real change. But the increasing popularity of Édouard Philippe in public opinion surveys – and which mirrored Macron’s declining popularity – made others doubt the sagacity of such a move.
Ever since his appointment in 2017, Philippe recurrently insisted upon his closeness with Macron, notably half-jokingly commenting that between them there was not “the beginning of the half of a sheet of cigarette paper”. He said that in his view a prime minister remained in his job as long as “three conditions are brought together: the president’s confidence, the support of the parliamentary majority, and the will to do [the job]”. But meeting those conditions has not been straightforward.
Some of those in the LREM party, representing a parliamentary majority almost entirely won over to Macron, who has entertained a political ambiguity of non-partisan alliance to the traditional political divide, have been wary of Philippe, a conservative who did not take part in the campaigning for the former’s election. In a recent letter sent to the president and revealed by news weekly Marianne, the leader of the LREM parliamentary group, Gilles Le Gendre, complained of how Philippe refrains from “involving himself in the affairs of the majority”, adding: “The government should be a true collective, which has never been the case for three years.”
Last Thursday, the office of Richard Ferrand, a former member of the PS who jumped ship to join Macron relatively early in his bid for the presidency, and who is now president (speaker) of the lower house, the National Assembly, rendered public a report in which Ferrand argued that several decisions it suggested were taken by Philippe had damaged the executive. “We must recognise also the contestation met by some reforms, such as that on pensions,” said Ferrand, adding that the “initially planned clarity” of the pension reform had been reduced – a reference to Philippe’s insistence on extending the age for full retirement rights.
Whatever is said officially, the relationship between Macron and his former prime minister began notably deteriorating during the crisis of the “yellow vest” movement, when Philippe was unhappy with the public spending the president announced to meet the demands of the social movement.
Enlargement : Illustration 2
But the major disagreements between the two men came about during the last few months and the crisis brought about by the Covid-19 epidemic when, for example, Macron, taking on the role of warlord, in a videoconference in early May with representatives of the hard-hit arts and culture sector (in French, here), said, “We enter a period where one must, in a way, mount the tiger, and so domesticate it” – speaking of the virus and its consequences. Philippe was firmly in the camp of caution over relaxing restrictions to contain the epidemic, and met with accusations of being too nervous, too rigid, and even too technocratic in his approach to lifting the lockdown.
Speaking in April, when the epidemic was still marking up a significant toll, however reduced, and in response to the French president’s optimistic comments on an imminent end to the lockdown on public movement – which saw more than two months of nationwide domestic confinement except for essential needs, but which also saw the essential workforce, healthcare workers, shop workers, utilities workers and more continue to brave the epidemic –, Philippe declared: “I am telling the French people, if the results are not apparent, we will not end the lockdown on May 11th, or we will do so in a more restrictive manner.” Philippe became irritated by the spread of the gung-ho comments from the French president relayed in the media.
Philippe was apparently notably angered by comments made by far-right French politician Philippe de Villiers an interview early in June with rolling new channel BFMTV. A former member of the French and European parliaments, Villiers was behind the creation of a theme park, the Puy du Fou, in west-central France, which was closed due to the Covid-19 pandemic restrictions. “On May 17th I had a conversation with Emmanuel Macron,” Villiers said, “and I said to him ‘why does Edouard Philippe do that, why don’t we end the lockdown sooner, and why do those same people who prohibited [us from using] masks when it was necessary, require us to use them when it is no longer necessary. Right. Why? He said to me, ‘Philippe, he [Édouard Philippe] is taking care of his legal threat’.”
The interviewer asked: “He spoke like that about his prime minister?”
“Yes, voilà,” replied Villiers.
Over the recent period, Édouard Philippe and Emmanuel Macron have not only manifested two different types of political approach, but also separate visons of their vision of the state and its functions.
Until very recently, the allies of Philippe continued to believe that the French president would have great difficulty in jettisoning a prime minister who had gained a status of political reference for the rightwing electorate, which he had appeared to represent. Meanwhile, those socialists who were the early ones to rally Macron’s movement in his push for the presidency, and now present in government, regard the recent success of the Greens in the municipal elections a potentially fatal – for them – re-composition of the Left. The appointment of Jean Castex as prime minister is unlikely to alleviate their fears.
-------------------------
- The original French version of this article can be found here.
English version by Graham Tearse