Macron He was re-elected president on April 24 and it has taken almost a month to designate the emblematic prime minister. Although the name finally chosen (the Minister of Labor, Élisabeth Borne) was already in the pools even before the second round.
Why Elisabeth Borne? In 2017 Macron won the presidential elections Marine LePen and to him, who came from socialism (he was Minister of Economy of the president Hollande) it was convenient for him to build a wide range of moderate socialists and pragmatic liberals for the legislative elections. The then chosen was Edouard Philippeone of the most open deputies (collaborator of Alain Juppe) right. Then he replaced it with Jean Castex, of the same trend, but with less ambition. The enemy planned for this year’s presidential elections was still Le Pen.
Now Macron has beaten Marine Le Pen for the second time. Y the enemy in the next legislative is no longer Le Pen but Jean Luc Mélenchon, leader of La Francia Insumisa, something like a French Podemos (more structured), who came third in the first round of the presidential elections a short distance from Le Pen and who has set up a broad front for the legislative elections with environmentalists, socialists and communists . Furthermore, all analysts believe that a flaw in his previous term was that reformist technocracy trumped social sensibilities too much. Macron is seen as a competent president but removed from the concerns of the people. A certain inflection was required.
Before the June legislative elections and in front of Mélenchon, an offer that looks a little less to the right and more to the center-left suits him. No, then, to a liberal prime minister, and yes to a competent social democrat without fanfare and who knows how to execute. She should also be a woman to help bury the image of the previous mandate.
Macron has thus explored the moderate left. It seems that he offered the position to Valerie Rabault, current president of the socialist parliamentary group, who declined for not wanting to extend retirement to 65 years. In the end, the calculated opening to the left has remained in familiar territory. Élisabeth Borne has indeed been linked to the socialists (in Lionel Jospin’s cabinet when he was Minister of Education and Ségolène Royal in Ecology).
But Borne is not an extension to the left because, like other socialists, he already opted for Macron in 2017 and has had three ministries: Transport, Ecological Transition and Labor and Social Inclusion. He is from the Polytechnic School, one of the highest administrative bodies, and although he declares himself to be a leftist has not been shy about carrying out reforms that unnerve the left. Or to a certain left. For example, that of the SNCF (the French Renfe), which had gold pensions, or that of unemployment insurance. Borne is a social democratic technocrat with a relevant career as a high-ranking civil servant who, up to now, has never submitted to an electoral process.
Macron winks at the socialists opposed to Mélenchon and appoints a prime minister, which has not happened since Mitterrand chose Edith Cresson in 1991. She is a competent woman who will execute Macron’s policy. Now we will have to see the composition of the new government, the maximum claim of the broad electoral coalition with which Macron wants to win the June elections.
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Will he be able and able to govern later in a different way from the first term and will he have less social response? That is another question.