France’s new centrist president, Emmanuel Macron, has appointed as prime minister Edouard Philippe from the rightwing party Les Républicains, reports The Guardian.
Philippe, 46, the mayor of the Normandy port town, Le Havre, comes from the centre-right faction of Les Républicains – the party led by Nicolas Sarkozy until last year that saw its candidate, François Fillon, knocked out in the first round of the presidential election.
Philippe, seen within his party as a centrist, supported the moderate, centre-right former prime-minister, Alain Juppé, in the party’s primary race to choose a presidential candidate last year.
As a student, Philippe was briefly an activist for the social-democrat line within the French Socialist Party before leaving the party to join the right. He has been a member of parliament for Normandy, where he abstained during the vote to legalise same-sex marriage in France in 2013. He has never held a government post.
Philippe comes from the same university background as Macron – he studied at Paris’s prestigious political science institute Sciences Po, then attended the exclusive Ecole Nationale de l’Administration, the civil service graduate school seen as production line for the French elite. The son of two teachers, he spent part of his childhood in Bonn in Germany where his father was for a time headteacher of the French lycée.
Philippe, who has worked for the French nuclear company Areva, has also co-authored novels.
The prime minister’s first task will be to lead the fierce battle in the June parliamentary elections to win a majority for Macron’s fledgling political movement, La République En Marche (La REM).
Without a majority, Macron would struggle to push through his planned changes to labour laws, pensions, education and the system of unemployment benefits.
The choice of a mayor from the Right means some figures from Les Républicains may now jump ship and stand for the parliamentary election under Macron’s banner. This would worsen the divisions inside the fractured French Right.
Macron, who has set out his own political line as “neither Left nor Right”, has sought what he calls a “pragmatic” alliance of people from all backgrounds and parties to push through his pro-business reforms. He has sought to benefit from the weakness of France’s traditional left and right governing parties, which were both knocked out of the presidential election at the first round amid anti-establishment anger among voters.
But Macron – who served as economy minister in the outgoing socialist government of former president François Hollande before resigning last year – has until now attracted dozens of centre-left MPs to his movement, and needed to reach out to the Right.