In his 2009 book Le Pouvoir ne se partage pas (“Power is not for sharing”), Édouard Balladur, the former French conservative prime minister (1993-1995), now aged 96, wrote harshly about some of his former contemporary political personalities. One, although he did not name him, was fellow Gaullist Jacques Chirac, who defeated him in their fratricidal battle for the presidency in 1995. “The true goal of politics is power, that alone,” wrote Balladur. “Among [those who are] the ordinary ambitious, everything is subordinated to that end, their forces given over to winning it, and to keep it, sometimes not knowing what to do with it. It is a preoccupation that is greater than any other.”
Could that description fit France’s new prime minister, Sébastien Lecornu? Whatever the answer, he is preceded by a reputation as someone who is an expert in the art of political manoeuvring. Not yet aged 40 (he turned 39 in June), his 20-year political career, initially rooted in Normandy, is stamped with obtaining power. It has involved political campaigning, electioneering, serving in provincial political roles (as mayor of the town of Vernon, as a member and head of local councils), serving as a senator, as a minister in four separate posts, and as a broker of ‘deals’. His allies explain that during the current crisis of France’s hung parliament, his aptness for the role of prime minister is his skill in the practice of “politicking”.
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A former minister who remains close to him, speaking on condition her name is withheld, commented: “He’s nice, a good colleague, he works hard, he doesn’t show off.” Among Emmanuel Macron’s political camp, which came to power in 2017 and was rapidly regarded as notably vertical in its hierarchical structure, Parisian in its make-up and arrogant in its behaviour, Lecornu has appeared more in character with the old-school Right.
With a CV that marks him out as a provincial political ‘baron’, the former mayor of Vernon in southern Normandy was a reassuring figure for those among his political colleagues, many of whom joined the new president from the Left and the right, who found themselves disconcerted by the somewhat brutal approach of the new Macronist executive. Lecornu did not sign up to the idea of a new way of doing politics, instead cultivating the customs of old. His form of politicking is having breakfast, lunch and dinner consultations, offering presents and sending attentive text messages, in a manner that has earned him an aura of empathy among his peers. The recognition of him by other ‘barons’ of political fiefdoms as one of their own has not escaped Macron, whose party has long struggled to put down provincial roots.
Judicial probe into suspected favouritism
Lecornu’s allies cite in particular his success, when armed forces minister, in pushing through parliament, in June 2023, new legislation significantly hiking the 2023-2030 military budget to a total of 413 billion euros. After what were unusually calm debates as the bill went through the National Assembly, the lower house, Lecornu garnered the support of the conservative Les Républicains party (LR), at the time an opposition party, and the far-right Rassemblement National (RN), and the abstention of the socialists and the Greens, leading to 418 votes (out of 577) in favour. That, his supporters claim, is an example of the “Lecornu method”.
Others are not convinced, like one former member of the government at the time, who commented (on condition his name was withheld): “When you arrive with 400 billion [euros], you don’t have to be a political maestro to reach a majority.” Meanwhile, Bastien Lachaud, a Member of Parliament (MP) for the radical-left La France Insoumise party, which at the time voted against the bill, recalled the “proper debates” during its passage through parliament. “He’s someone who is respectful, rounded in approach, but who was rigid at heart,” said Lachaud. “We were against the bill, and he made no major concession on its substance.”
Lecornu’s “method” is also a liberal use of public money. In July, Mediapart revealed how, in the summer of 2022 when Lecornu was minister for France’s overseas territories, his office agreed to spend 100,000 euros for the purchase 3,500 copies of a book by businessman Max Dubois, who was active in supporting Emmanuel Macron’s election campaign.
In May 2023, the financial crimes branch of the French public prosecution services, the Parquet national financier (PNF), launched a still ongoing investigation into suspected favouritism and conflict of interest in two lucrative contracts issued, in 2021 and 2022, to former TV newsreader Jean-Claude Narcy. The first was drawn up by Lecornu’s ministry for France’s overseas territories and the second by the council of the Eure département (county) in Normandy, at the time presided over by Lecornu. The contracts were for the organisation by Narcy, a friend of the Lecornu family, of two exhibitions, and were signed without the issue of a public tender. In 2021, the French national audit body, the Cour des Comptes, issued a damning report on spending by Lecornu’s ministry, which it warned was of “a nature to expose it to particular risks in terms of image, economy and exemplarity”.
Jumping ships
Beyond the descriptions and recollections about his artful practice of politics, the portraits of Lecornu in other areas paint a somewhat hollow vision. “He’s not an ideologist,” said one source with close knowledge of the new prime minister, also speaking on condition his name was withheld.
His first political mentor was Bruno Le Maire, a veteran conservative with shared political roots in Normandy, and who took him on as an advisor when Le Maire was junior minister for European affairs under the presidency of Nicolas Sarkozy. Le Maire jumped political ships in 2017 when he served as newly elected centre-right president Emmanuel Macron’s economy and finance minister until 2024.
In 2016, Lecornu played a leading role in Le Maire’s failed bid in the LR primaries to become conservative candidate for the 2017 presidential elections. They were won by Sarkozy’s former prime minister François Fillon, after which Lecornu became Fillon’s election campaign manager. When Fillon’s campaign was scuppered in early 2017, just months from the poll, when it was revealed that he had fraudulently put his wife on the parliamentary payroll as his assistant, Lecornu, like Le Maire, joined the Macron camp, by then well on its way to power. He was rewarded immediately after Macron’s election with a post in government as a secretary of state within the environment ministry.
In interviews with the media, Lecornu’s friends present him as a man of the “provincial popular Right,” one who champions law and order but who is at the same time “sensitive to the country’s social ambitions”. But the key words are difficult to pronounce, such it is that, beyond a self-declared affiliation to a nebulous “Gaullism”, Lecornu has been careful to remain silent on the major issues that have stirred public debate in France over recent years.
In April 2023, when recurrent demonstrations in opposition to Macron’s reform of the pension system were at their height, the then armed forces minister limited his reflection to the issue he masters the best: that of the method of proposing the reform. Without criticising the substance of the legislation – as proposed and which was finally adopted by decree, by-passing a vote in parliament – he said the government (then led by Élisabeth Borne) had missed an opportunity in its preparation. “We did not succeed in convincing the opposition and the trades unions to share the responsibility of balancing the social [benefits] accounts,” he told news website Actu.fr.
While he has developed a strong approach to international and geostrategic issues, the subject of a book he published in France last year, entitled Vers la guerre ? (Towards war?), the new prime minister is less forward on his views concerning national issues. In that respect, Macron is renewing with the criteria he employed for the appointments of his prime ministers from mid-2020 to mid-2024, respectively Jean Castex, Gabriel Attal and Élisabeth Borne. All of them low profile from an ideological point of view, they were presented as representing a change in method of governing, and the embracing of a culture of compromise.
After the hung parliament that resulted from snap parliamentary elections called by the French president in June last year, and which has produced continued political instability ever since, Macron was forced to compromise in his choice of the prime ministers who agreed to walk, and who fell off, the tightrope of confidence votes.
First was the conservative Michel Barnier, in place between last September and December, and then François Bayrou, appointed in December and who was forced to resign on Monday after losing a confidence vote of his own calling. Barnier and Bayrou, both aged 74, are veterans of French politics, with well-anchored political convictions, and were in truth little appreciated within the presidential Élysée Palace. With Lecornu, Macron has once again found the person who fits his requirements of a head of government – that of putting in place the policies Macron himself has fixed. The president has made known that he strongly believes Lecornu, who he warmly appreciates, will be a successful prime minister.
The relationship of mutual esteem between the two men is not surprising. Behind the appearance of a rejuvenated old-school Gaullist politician, Lecornu has a very ‘Macronist’ political manner. Following the so-called “yellow vest” grass roots protest movement that began in 2018 over living standards, against Macron, his government and political elites in general, Lecornu was the organiser of a subsequent nationwide series of public debates (dubbed as the “Great Debate”), presented as a campaign to consult the population on their grievances and aspirations and which was given a largely positive reception in the media. But the operation produced no lasting effect, and the propositions and hopes raised by the public and recorded after each debate were soon forgotten.
As for the handling of the tensions in New Caledonia, France’s Pacific Ocean archipelago where a simmering conflict pitches the largely pro-independence, indigenous Kanak population against European, mostly French, settlers, Lercornu showed little political tact while overseas territories minister between 2020-2022. The breaching then of the pledges in the 1998 Nouméa Accord, which had handed greater political power to Kanak representatives (as did also those of the 1988 Matignon Agreements, the result of a bitter and bloody campaign for independence in the 1980s), were regarded as an affront by the pro-independence camp, leading to the violent revolts of 2024. “He [Lecornu] began the hostilities leading the country into the chaos we know,” read a statement issued last week by the main Kanak pro-independence Kanak party, the FLNKS. It concluded that there was “nothing positive for the future of our country” in Lecornu’s appointment as prime minister.
Lecornu’s detractors among the presidential camp have not been shy to sarcastically highlight his record of creating, as one former minister put it, “excellent” results in elections in France’s overseas territories. After his two years as minister for overseas territories, the electorate in many of them voted massively for far-right candidate Marine Le Pen in the 2022 presidential elections, while in the ensuing legislative elections, it was the leftwing coalition which did well. That was a major rout for Macron’s camp, and which highlighted the gaping disconnect between the French president and the populations of the overseas territories.
In the runup to his appointment as prime minister, several members of the ruling centre-right and conservative coalition did their very best to prevent it. According to one account, this included a warning given to Macron’s inner circle that Lecornu is “completely overvalued”, enjoining them, for proof of this, to “take a look” at the Eure département in Normandy that he made into his political fiefdom. Macron’s party had hold of all five parliamentary constituencies there until the legislative elections of 2022, when they all fell to the opposition – four to the far-right RN party, and one to the Parti Socialiste. One of the local far-right MPs, Kévin Mauvieux, took to X on Wednesday to post a message claiming: “Lecornu’s ‘fiefdom’ definitively rejects the Macronian ideology.”
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- The original French version of this article can be found here.
English version by Graham Tearse