Seated at the round table in the 'portrait room' on Tuesday, four men were having a working dinner, their notebooks never far away. On the political menu was the composition of the next French government. To carry out this task Emmanuel Macron had invited to the Élysée the three men with whom he will now be running France.
On the president's right was the unassailable figure of Alexis Kohler, the head-of-state's chief of staff - his formal title is secretary general of the Élysée – who is still said to about to leave but who is still firmly in place. Opposite him was Gabriel Attal, the prime minister appointed by the president earlier that day.
To the left was the final member of the quartet, who listened but didn't speak. Emmanuel Moulin is Gabriel Attal's new chief of staff, whom he has met before. The two men's paths had crossed at the Treasury where the former was the senior civil servant or director, and the latter was briefly minister for public accounts. Now here the pair were, face to face, having to their great surprise just been appointed by the head of state himself.
Enlargement : Illustration 1
The exclusive domain of the establishment, the post of chief of staff to the prime minister is a privilege accorded to the most experienced senior civil servants. In one of his books (Impressions et lignes claires, published by JC Lattès, 2021), Macron's first prime minister Édouard Philippe talked of the position involving “the most delicate and sensitive functions in the Republic” and he described the person in charge of them – the chief of staff - as the “linchpin” at the top of the state, the “control tower”, “the one who carries the greatest weight in the execution of decisions”.
Kohler's friend
When, at midday on Monday, Emmanuel Macron had pulled the name of Gabriel Attal out of the hat as the person he wanted to appoint as prime minister, senior figures in his own political family found it hard to believe. Veteran centrist politician François Bayrou, Macron loyalist Richard Ferrand and Édouard Philippe all warned him: Attal was young, inexperienced and not yet ready. Nor did an even closer ally, Alexis Kohler, the president's right-hand man, take kindly to the promotion of a minster whom he does not know that well.
It was as a result of such reticence that the idea of appointing Emmanuel Moulin as chief of staff to the new premier emerged. Since 2020 he had been in charge of the Treasury, one of the central and most crucial departments in the state machinery, having previously been chief of staff to economy minister Bruno Le Maire. He is also – and perhaps above all - a friend of Alexis Kohler, with whom he attended Sciences Po university, as a time when the two were fans of socialist politician Michel Rocard and his aim to modernise the Left.
The idea reassured both the secretary general of the Elysée and the president himself: both men saw Moulin as the perfect foil for Gabriel Attal. He was an old hand, a skilled operator, knowledgeable on the economy, who knows the workings of the state by heart and who had advised Nicolas Sarkozy when the latter was at the Elysée. Yet the path from the Treasury to the prime minister's office, Matignon, is not a well-trodden one. And Treasury directors are rarely brought in to be a prime minister's chief of staff. “It's a first,” one senior civil servant even suggested.
In the corridors of power, where one is more used to seeing this position go to a senior former prefect, someone from the State Council advisory and administrative body or another major organ of state, seeing the Treasury “take over Matignon” is neither normal nor very reassuring. But others are more upbeat. “He's not some caricature of a senior Treasury mandarin stuck in his own certainties,” says Henri Guaino, who came across the new chief of staff when he himself worked as a special advisor to Nicolas Sarkozy. “He's an intelligent lad, very nice, open and someone who understands the state.”
Enlargement : Illustration 2
However, for Gabriel Attal the appointment of Emmanuel Moulin may make it feel as if he has been placed under supervision by the Élysée. Like Jean Castex and Élisabeth Borne before him, on whom Emmanuel Macron had imposed Nicolas Revel and Aurélien Rousseau as chiefs of staff, the new prime minister has not been free to choose his closest member of staff. Only Édouard Philippe, who became prime minister in 2017, avoided this fate, arriving at Matignon with his friend Benoît Ribadeau-Dumas as his chief of staff.
This move shows that Emmanuel Macron intends to keep his new head of government on a short leash, despite the “energy” that he sees in him. The enforced pairing made up by a prime minister and his closest advisor is always something of a risk. In the TV drama The West Wing, the fictitious president Josiah Bartlet says to one of his ministers: “You got a best friend? Is he smarter than you? [If so] that's your chief of staff.”
Emmanuel Moulin is not Gabriel Attal's best friend, and not even a friend of a prime minister who has very few among the political classes. Did the new prime minister grab a quick word with Élisabeth Borne during their meeting for the traditional handing over of powers? If so, she could have told him about all the problems she had in working with Aurélien Rousseau for a year, before her chief of staff finally quit, exhausted by the incompatibility of their characters.
Liked by Sarkozy supporters
A key condition for this enforced pairing to work lies in the ideological compatibility of the two figures involved. There is less concern over that in the current instance, given that both men have shown great political flexibility during their careers. A Rocardien – supporter of Michel Rocard – since university days, Emmanuel Moulin, too, wants to “modernise the Left”, and his outlook is said to have been “marked by demonstrations [editor's note, against a new law on universities under the government of prime minister Jacques Chirac] and the death of Malik Oussekine”, a young Franco-Algerian killed by French police.
His political journey then led him towards Sarkozy, whom he served under at the Treasury and later the Élysée, then to the private sector and finally to Emmanuel Macron, following a path followed by all political personalities and senior civil servants who over the past decades have navigated a course between the two sides.
For Nicolas Sarkozy's friends, Emmanuel Moulin's arrival at the prime minister's office is good news. Just as it was when Jean Castex, another former Élysée advisor, was appointed prime minister in 2020. The pleasure is enhanced by the fact that on two occasions – with Catherine Vautrin in the summer of 2022, and Sébastien Lecornu just the other day - Emmanuel Macron gave up on the idea of appointing a rightwing prime minister in the face of protests from his own inner circle.
The interventions of François Bayrou concerning “anyone who resembles a Sarkozyist”, as one of his allies puts it, has not escaped the attention of those on the Right and especially not the former president himself. “François Bayrou has personally sought to be an obstacle as soon as he detects Nicolas Sarkozy's presence, it gets hostile and puerile,” says one leading figure on the Right. In this respect Emmanuel Macron is reassuring Nicolas Sarkozy, who is keen to maintain his networks in the heart of power (see also the new ministerial team which has drifted to the right).
Bailing out the private sector
What can we say concretely about this senior civil servant's past actions? We can start by saying that if there is one man in France whom the private sector can thank then it is indeed Emmanuel Moulin. In each crisis he has been one of those who has employed public money to save businesses in trouble. This first occurred when he was deputy chief of staff to minister Christine Lagarde at the Treasury (2007 to 2009), and then as Nicolas Sarkozy's economic advisor at the Élysée (2009 to 2012) where he played an active role in drawing up the rescue plan for the French economy after the subprime financial crisis. The state put up 360 billion euros to save French banks from failing and, as a result of grants and lower taxes for the rest of the economy, the country's debt ratio went from 65% of GDP in 2007 to 85% in 2010.
The problem was that the state never asked the private sector for anything in return for all this help, indeed quite the contrary. While the banks came through it very well while remaining in the private sector, the government called for austerity measures to reduce the public debt. That was the outcome of the Deauville bail-out pact in 2010 between Nicolas Sarkozy – whose economic advisor at the time was Emmanuel Moulin – and the German chancellor Angela Merkel.
In exchange for more financial solidarity on the German side, France committed itself to accelerating the speed of its structural reforms. What followed was the decision at the end of 2010 to scrap the legal retirement age of 60 and the two most austere budgets of the century, in 2011 and 2012. Carried out across the Eurozone, these austerity cures following a massive bail-out of the private sector are now seen as an historic error because they undermined the potential for growth in the economies of the Old Continent.
Yet more than a decade later, during the Covid crisis, the strategy was the same. And Emmanuel Moulin was once again at the forefront. As chief of staff to economy minister Bruno Le Maire in 2020 he was the brains behind the partial activity scheme for companies (a form of partial employment), state-backed loans, the auto industry plan, one-off payments to restaurant owners, a delay on payment of taxes and social charges, and so on. The level of French debt rose by 20 percentage points, from 97% of GDP to 117% of GDP in just one year.
And just as after the subprime crisis, the private sector was not asked to give anything in return. To reduce public debt between now and 2027 close to 15 billion euros in savings have been earmarked to come out of the social model, thanks to the pension reform that pushes the legal age of retirement from 62 to 64, and thanks also to two successive reforms of the unemployment benefit system that cut the the period of cover by a quarter. A new dose of austerity is also expected in 2025.
That is Emmanuel Moulin's record in more than 15 years as an advisor to this country's political decision makers.
Revolving door between public and private
But that record would not be complete if one did not also include the periods he spent away from the public sector and worked in the private sector, a revolving door practice among top civil servants that is known as 'pantouflage' in French. In 2012, having been snubbed by the incoming administration of President François Hollande, he left to work in the private sector with Eurotunnel. Then in 2015 he was recruited by the investment bank Mediobanca, for whom he played a central role in the privatisation of public infrastructures.
In fact “from his arrival, the investment bank saw all the doors of the French state opened. In 2017 Mediobanca was classified in third place among banks advising the state, just behind Rothschild,” wrote our colleague Laurent Mauduit in his book 'Predations' about the privatisation of public assets.
In particular, the Agence des Participations de l'État (APE) - the agency overseeing state investment in strategic sectors – used Mediobanca as an adviser over the privatisation of Nice airport in the south of France. This deal was marred, moreover, by suspicions of conflicts of interest which were criticised in 2018 by the official public accounts body the Cour des Comptes.
The magistrates on that body pointed to the “appearance of a risky situation in the case of the sale of Aéroports de la Côte d’Azur, with the investment bank Mediobanca who were selected to provide economic advice to the state being a minority shareholder in Atlantia, the main member of the successful consortium”.
In short, the bank Medioabanca, which hired Emmanuel Moulin for this kind of operation, was on the side of the seller – the French state – and of the purchaser at the same time. This, however, did no harm to the career of the senior civil servant who has been promoted since.
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- The original French version of this article can be found here.
English version by Michael Streeter