Emmanuel Macron has played a key role in shaping French President François Hollande’s economic and industrial strategy, both as an advisor to Hollande during his 2012 election campaign, and more crucially over the past two years as the president’s deputy-chief-of-staff.
His appointment as economy minister on Tuesday, the major event of an otherwise mild government reshuffle, is a consecration both for him personally and for Hollande’s economic policies to which he has significantly contributed, and which came under fierce attack from Macron’s predecessor, the firebrand leftist Arnaud Montebourg.

Macron, 36, a graduate of the elite ENA school that grooms technocrats and future politicians, including Hollande, and a former banker, has long been an ardent champion of a “modern Left”.
In 2013, while he was deputy chief-of-staff to Hollande, he was interviewed by Mediapart journalists Lénaïg Bredoux and Joseph Confavreux as part of a report to define just what was the already-embattled president’s personal political brand. Some, but not all, of Macron’s comments were included in that report, and now, following his surprise promotion to the post of economy minister, Mediapart publishes below a verbatim text of the full interview he gave then, recorded in comments upon diffreent issues, translated here into English (bracketed italics are editor’s notes to help clarify certain phrases and references).
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'Traditional leftist ideology doesn't recognise reality'
“We have de facto entered a period made up of more constraints, where our model is cracking apart everywhere, because financial, European and political-social constraints are crushing us everywhere. We can no longer present the Left as [the force of] the infinite extension of rights. The traditional Left is for the extension of rights, like [in Prime Minister Lionel Jospin’s socialist government of] between 1997 and 2002, with the [extended public healthcare insurance] CMU, the 35-hour week or the Pacs [civil union].
Still today, because we are in a time of crisis, in a world of transition, the Left is strung-up about its [traditional ideological] ‘objects’. And its reference points are very classic. When you are on the Left, you’re against the deportation of foreigners and for the French people’s purchasing power. I could have said the same thing, eyes closed, five, ten or 15 years ago. It’s not a modern thing and there is no approach towards the whole.
Purchasing power is the meeting point of a wage with the cost of living. If you say that wages must be systematically increased either the state pays, and the debt that suffocates the French economy continues to mount, or either companies [pay], who progress in a open world in which they already delocalize because of labour costs that are too high. If to be on the Left means to stamp your foot saying “I’m for the French people’s purchasing power” well, honestly that’s a policy that'll last six months. You’d make yourself happy but it won’t get very far.
Traditional left-wing ideology doesn’t allow for thinking about the reality as it is. We [on the Left] are lacking tools, it has to be recognised. The Left has not re-thought its ‘objects’ enough."
'Class warfare takes us further down an impasse'
"What we call in a bit of an old-fashioned way ‘socialisme de l’offre’ [broadly meaning pro-market policies] is to pay attention to the spread of roles between different economic actors. We want to preserve the French social [protection] model, and our policies must not be to the detriment of wage-earners. But we also recognise the necessity of having an engine in the economy, and that engine is [made up of] companies.
This ‘socialisme de l’offre’ implies therefore a rethink of one of the Left’s reflexes, according to which a company is the place of class warfare and a profound misalignment of interests. It is partly so, which is what we correct with social and labour laws. But it is not only that. On the economic front, it is an alignment of forces. The battle is not to be fought within the company, but rather for the conquest of new markets and new clients. The more a French company has the capacity to obtain added value and growth, the more it can redistribute it. If we remain in a traditional criteria of class warfare, and therefore in a division of the human collectivity inside a company, then we will continue down the impasse in which we find ourselves.
Our economic policy has also an industrial policy. In our ‘socialisme de l’offre’, or of production, there are macro-economic choices but also a true political voluntarism. We try to agree contracts with the parties present, we try to orientate their action. That’s the case for example with the [government’s strategic] 34 industrial plans."
'There will be difficult moments'
“I believe there is really a path we are carving [which is there] to follow, which is neither this Pavlovian left-wing reflex which consists of a bad reviving of class warfare, nor this type of anything goes free market thinking that consists of saying that a capitalist must be able to make profits to be happy, and that if he is happy and free it will be good for the economy. This [path] has difficulty in giving itself a name, but it changes the classic reference points of the Left without, for as much, being on the land of the Right.
The ideological direction is to make society more just, but also stronger. We want to move towards a France that is more in charge of its destiny, more independent of the outside than it is today to be able to make and live with its choices. More involved in globalization, more open, less statutory within itself, which leaves greater chances for individuals, a country where we’d increased the ‘equality of possibils’ to borrow the phrase used by [French economist] Eric Maurin.
The modern Left is that which gives individuals the possibility of facing things, even bad turns. It can no longer reason in terms of statutes. The society of statutes where everything would be prepared for will inexorably disappear. There will therefore be difficult moments with the history of the Left because that means re-thinking past certitudes which are, to my eyes, dead stars.”
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The French text of this interview can be found here.