Borne Supremacy: France’s new prime minister is a Macron true-believer

President Macron took his time but has now done exactly what was predicted. By appointing 61-year-old Elisabeth Borne to the post of prime minister, he has not only struck a modest blow for the status of women in French politics, but assured himself of the services of a true believer, capable of pushing through his tough and controversial legislative programme. 

Borne – only the second woman to head a French government – is a technocrat. An engineer by profession, she has served as a departmental Prefect, a minister in two different departments – transport and the environment – and, most recently, as minister for labour and economic inclusion, the French equivalent of levelling up. 

Her political provenance is Socialist, which helps as Macron in his second term pivots fractionally to the left. But Borne came on board in advance of the 2017 presidential elections and has frequently been at the heart of the action, taking on the might of the railway workers’ union on the key issue of pension reform and early retirement and pushing through several bills aimed at reducing France’s dependence on fossil fuels. 

Jean Castex, Macron’s faithful factotum for the last two years, had already announced that he was ready to resign, and did so formally on Monday. He will be remembered as a single-issue prime minister, brought in to oversee the state’s response to Covid-19. Borne, by contrast, will be charged with securing Macron’s legacy as a tough, no-nonsense President, with a focus, outside of Europe and the war in Ukraine, on economic and social reform. 

In theory, her tenure in the historic Hotel Matignon, on Paris’s left bank, could prove even shorter lived than that of her only female predecessor, Édith Cresson, who held the post of prime minister under François Mitterrand for less than a year, between May 1991 and April 1992. Elections to the National Assembly are less than a month away, and if the newly-agreed coalition of the Left, known as NUPE (La Nouvelle Union Populaire Écologique et Sociale), achieves its goal, the incoming PM could be none other than Jean-Luc Mélenchon, the crusty, dogmatic, quasi-Marxist leader of France Unbowed. 

Mélenchon has bounded back with remarkable speed, and some panache, from his narrow defeat in the first round of last month’s presidentials by Marine Le Pen of the far-right National Rally. He believes that his new pan-Socialist front, in which the the once proud Parti Socialiste and the Greens play only supporting roles, no more esteemed than the Communists, will capture hundreds of seats this time, making him prime minister in the most mismatched cohabitation in the history of the Fifth Republic. 

He may just get his way, in which case watch out for fireworks. More likely, however, the NUPE bloc and the corresponding Le Pen faction, will merely prove an irritant as Macron’s En Marche – entertainingly rebranded as Renaissance – and its allies in the smaller Movement for Democracy (MoDem) continue to hold the centre ground. 

Everything hangs on how angry and resentful voters are in the face of the re-election of a President almost universally regarded as both élitist and smug. Who else but Macron, they will be asking themselves, could regard his achievement as equivalent to that of Italy in the 15th century, with himself (we have to assume) cast in the role of Lorenzo the Magnificent? Voters of all stripes would love to take him down a peg but must reckon with the inevitable consequence – a dysfunctional government at a time of international crisis, leading to legislative chaos and fresh elections. 

Mélenchon, in any case, is not exactly Uriah Heap. A synthesis, in UK terms, of Jeremy Corbyn and Michael Foot, with the strengths and weaknesses of both, he is a man on a mission, driven by his conviction that, after years of rightwards drift, France has to be taken back to the true faith. 

His problem is that he not only faces a master strategist in Macron, but a recidivist campaigner in Marine Le Pen, who, like him, harbours ambitions to be prime minister and is working hard, against all the odds, to secure a three-figure bloc in the Assembly. 

To illustrate the magnitude of the task ahead, it is only necessary to look at the makeup of the outgoing body. The combined Left won 57 seats in 2017, the far-right eight, the centre-right 112 and En Marche and MoDem, between them, 350. 

Times change and voting patterns with them. Both Mélenchon and Le Pen performed well in the first round of the presidentials, obliging Macron, in the midst of the Ukraine crisis, to go on the stump. But he still won comfortably. The expectation in respect of the parliamentary contest, to be held on 12 and 19 of June, is that Left and Right will both pick up seats (Mélenchon in particular), but that En Marche, with or without the support of the centre-right Republicans, will come away with by far the largest share of the vote.

The French may resent the Medici-like presumptions of their once and future President, but the polls suggest they are not ready to turn the Assembly into a battleground. It would be enough for most if Macron had to work for his success, with the outliers of left, right and centre snapping at his heels. 

Which brings us back to the Borne Supremacy. The new head of government has already started work, consulting with the President over the composition of her new cabinet. The list of ministers will take shape this week and next, with some old hands discarded like used gloves and their replacements welcomed into the fold. 

Micromanaging is part of the Macron style of government. He has personally approved, or vetoed, hundreds of En Marche candidates, even deselecting deputies who risked their careers by standing by him in 2017 in favour of hard-nosed party functionaries more ready to toe the party line. The resulting distress and disaffection might normally lead to rebellion in the ranks, except, of course, that those protesting will no longer have a vote in parliament and the source of their resentment, with no more elections to fight, is safely above the fray. 

Will Borne be a leavening factor in the process now underway, standing up for her colleagues, or will she be her master’s voice? And just as intriguing, who will be selected as court painter charged with capturing for posterity the image of Macron the Magnificent?