Amid the heat of a July heatwave, and squeezed in between two foreign trips by President Emmanuel Macron, a new French government under prime minister Élisabeth Borne has been formed. The Élysée announced the make up of the government - dubbed 'Borne III' following the premier's two previous ministerial teams – on Thursday afternoon. News of the reshuffle was communicated to the media via a statement. Unlike previous occasions there was no formal reading out of the ministerial names at an Élysée lectern by Macron's chief of staff Alexis Kohler. This was, according to the head of state's entourage, a way of downplaying the scope of this reshuffle.
When one looks more closely at the membership of this new government one can see why the presidency was so modest about it. In key aspects 'Borne III' is just a copy of 'Borne II' which itself was simply the little brother of the prime minister's first government, 'Borne I', which was formed in May 2022. Gérald Darmanin is still the interior minister, Bruno Le Maire is still steering the nation's economy and finances, Catherine Colonna remains foreign minister, Sébastien Lecornu stays in place as the armed forces minister, Éric Dupond-Moretti is once again justice minister, Olivier Dussopt stays as employment minister and Christophe Béchu continues to have responsibility for environmental transition.
Enlargement : Illustration 1
In other words, the government's leading figures all remain in place with the same portfolios. Other prominent ministers such as Rima Abdul-Malak at culture, Marc Fesneau at agriculture and Amélie Oudéa-Castéra, in charge of sport, also stay in post. One interesting point to note for political aficionados; not only did Gérald Darmanin not become prime minister – a post he covets – he also failed to be appointed to the senior status of minister of state, despite recent rumours.
However, things have changed in the rest of the government. Around a dozen portfolios now have a new minister in charge. Since she learnt a week ago that she was staying in post, prime minster Élisabeth Borne has been fighting to make this reshuffle as wide-ranging as possible. The strategic differences between the prime minister and the president over the shape of the new team dragged out the suspense, making it a “torture” for ministers, according to one advisor.
Indeed, the announcement of the reshuffle was postponed several times. Even on Thursday it had been expected in the morning, but was in the end drip-fed during the day as the press picked up on each appointment. This led to some ridiculous situations: the under-pressure minister Marlène Schiappa ended up announcing her own departure, while health minister François Braun was interviewed at length about his actions on news channel BFMTV before being dismissed from his post just a few hours later.
Reading the list of the new government issued by the Élysée, one's attention is drawn to the names who no longer feature on it. Six ministers have left the government, making it look as though Emmanuel Macron wanted to correct errors made in his appointments last summer. After his re-election the president gambled on picking figures from civil society, experts in their field but people who were new to politics. The president has now brought a halt to that approach: education minister Pap Ndiaye has left the government, as has solidarity minister Jean-Christophe Combe, overseas minister Jean-François Carenco, Isabelle Rome, who was minister in charge of equality, and health minister François Braun. Meanwhile the minister for the social economy, solidarity and charities, Marlène Schiappa, who was politically damaged by a controversy over an anti-extremism fund she set up, has also lost her job.
The ruling party's Parliamentarians rewarded
There is one minor surprise among the new faces: and that is the appointment of Aurélien Rousseau as the new health minister. Last Monday this senior civil servant quit his post as chief of staff to the prime minister, whose personality he was finding harder and harder to bear. However, he is much liked at the Élysée and so the man who ran the Agence Régionale de Santé (ARS) health authority for the Paris region during the Covid crisis has now accepted a senior government post.
At the Ministry of Health Aurélien Rousseau will have to work with his wife, Marguerite Cazeneuve, deputy director of the national health insurance body Assurance Maladie, who also wrote the health section of Emmanuel Macron's 2022 presidential election manifesto. As soon as news of Rousseau's appointment leaked on BFMTV on Thursday, questions were being posed about ethical issues that could arise from this partnership.
The remaining new appointments appear to represent the president's response to an urgent need: to add more of a political dimension to the government and to reward his supporters. That is how one should see the appointment of Gabriel Attal as the new minister of education. In Macron's first term he had been a junior minister for youth and then the official government spokesperson, before moving to his most recent position as minister in charge of public accounts.
In their bid to strengthen the government Élisabeth Borne and Emmanuel Macron have mostly drawn on members of the National Assembly. Five MPs from Macron's Renaissance party have joined the ministerial team: Aurore Bergé, hitherto the president of the Renaissance group at the Assembly, becomes minister for solidarity; Fadila Khattabi, the chair of the social affairs committee at the Assembly, is the new minister for the disabled; Thomas Cazenave, an MP from the Gironde in south-west France, takes on the post of minister for public accounts; and Sabrina Agresti-Roubache, an MP from the Bouches-du-Rhône département or county in the south of France, becomes a junior minister in charge of urban affairs.
This reward for loyalty underlines the extent to which both the Élysée and the prime minister's office had grown weary of the inability of ministers from a civil society background to champion their portfolios politically and in the media. Meanwhile in recent months Aurore Bergé has been boasting inside the party of her MPs' ability to support the presidential line. “During the reform of the pensions our MPs appeared in the media more than 70 times and there were no gaffes,” she explained recently. “That's more than the government can say.”
The message has cleared reached the top. The Élysée and prime minister's office will also have noted that the timing was right for a major promotion of MPs. It takes a month to organise a temporary replacement for MPs who are promoted to ministerial ranks. So making this move just before the summer recess may avoid collateral damage from any brief loss of MPs in an Assembly where Macron's party and its allies no longer have an overall majority. On the other hand, the presidential camp will now have to make good the resulting shortage in strong figures at an Assembly which is more divided than ever. Sylvain Maillard, the number two at Renaissance's Parliamentary group, has already made clear his desire to succeed Aurore Bergé.
Urban affairs under the wing of the Interior Ministry: a clear message to local communities
The new government team met on Friday morning for its first ministerial meeting. And President Macron gave a televised address before heading on a trip to the semi-autonomous French south-west Pacific territory of New Caledonia. At the cabinet meeting Macron told ministers that the recent unrest across France – which followed the shooting of 17-year-old Nahel by a police officer in a Paris suburb at the end of June - had highlighted “a risk of fragmentation, of deep division, of the nation” and that there was a “need for authority and respect”. He also told the new government team: “We must draw the lessons from what happened, and provide sound answers.” This task would “shape” the government's work after the summer break, Macron said.
Just after the controversy of the pension reforms in the spring, Emmanuel Macron had in fact promised a period of “a hundred days of calming down” the nation. But any last pretence that calm could be restored was swept away by that urban unrest.
So how has Macron responded to those recent events in ministerial terms? The minister who was in charge of urban affairs, as well as housing, Olivier Klein, kept a low profile during the disturbances, as indeed he had done for the past year. He has now been dismissed and his portfolio split in two. Former socialist Patrice Vergriete, the mayor of Dunkirk in the north of France, takes over the housing portfolio, while the MP from Marseille, Sabrina Agresti-Roubache, will tackle urban affairs.
This means that just a few weeks after the unveiling of the government's plan for local neighbourhoods, 'Quartiers 2030', after an inter-ministerial meeting on urban policy, and after the unrest and anger seen on the streets, the issue of France's often neglected suburbs will now be overseen by a minister of more junior status. And, for the first time, urban affairs is now under the joint control of the Ministry of the Interior.
If one also considers the recent appointment of a hard-right figure, Lydia Guirous, as the deputy prefect in charge of social cohesion and integration in the Gironde, the government can be seen to be sending a very clear message: that the response to what is happening in working class and deprived neighbourhoods will be based first and foremost on law and order.
Aside from this area, the other changes in the government may be an attempt to correct mistakes made after Emmanuel Macron's re-election but these appointments will have zero impact on the political direction of his second term. Worse than that, and contrary to all that he has said for six years, the president has just done exactly what he criticised his predecessors for doing: appointing professional politicians to positions that have no connection with their personal political commitments and their fields of expertise. How else can one explain the fact that Aurore Bergé is in charge of the solidarity brief, and that Philippe Viguier is in charge of French overseas territories, given their lack of track record in those areas?
Though it has been promised many times since 2017, the Macron 'revolution' still seems far away. The latest indication of this is the striking decision to retain Olivier Dussopt and Éric Dupond-Moretti in their posts. Both ministers have the threat of criminal trials hanging over them; the former for favouritism in relation to an allegedly rigged contract, the latter for an illegal conflict of interest. Yet they are both still in the government, with the private and public backing of the president. Meanwhile MP Fadila Khattabi joins the government despite the fact that she lost a case at an industrial tribunal last month for not paying one of her Parliamentary workers overtime.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
- The original French version of this article can be found here.
English version and additional reporting by Michael Streeter