One thing is certain: France’s government will be renewed this weekend in preparation for an autumn of high legislative achievement … possibly.
The cabinet – or what remains of it – has been put on standby for a reshuffle starting with the appointment of a new interior minister to replace Gérard Collomb, who resigned from the Government’s most glamorous position to campaign for his old job as mayor of Lyon.
Under the constitution of the Fifth Republic, the prime minister is the President’s number two and, ideally, a close confidant, as is the case with the current holder of the office, Édouard Philippe. But it is commonly understood that the interior minister, with his vast responsibility for the security of France, answers only to the Élysée.
When Collomb, a 71-year-old political veteran and one-time mentor to Emmanuel Macron, decided last month that he’d had enough of being second-guessed and pushed around by the President, it was a moment of truth for the administration, which until the summer had regarded itself as pretty well invulnerable.
The first blow to that sense of invincibility came when Macron’s personal head of security, Alexandre Benalla, was revealed to have impersonated a police officer and beaten up May Day protesters on the streets of Paris. Benalla, generally reckoned to be as much an adviser as a protection officer, had to be sacked. That scandal rumbles on, with an investigation by the Senate due to report any day now. Next up came the shock resignation of Nicolas Hulot, the environment minister, formerly a popular television presenter, who complained that he could get nothing done and was overcome with a sense of futility. That hurt.
Collomb’s departure – which Macron worked hard to prevent – was the final straw. The Jupiter President had become Mercury in retrograde, struggling to hold on to his people. To make things worse, the interior ministry had to be handed over temporarily to the PM, who is thus obliged to perform two full-time jobs at the very heart of government.
“Crisis?”, as Jim Callaghan used to say when the roof was falling in. “What crisis?” This weekend, newly returned from a starring role at the 17th World Francophone summit in (of all places) Armenia, Macron was obliged to pour over a list of candidates to take over at the Hôtel Beauvau, home of the interior ministry, just down the road from the Élysée .
This being France, the list had already been vetted by the High Authority for Transparency in Public Life, an austere body, not unlike the Académie française, which prides itself on its confidentiality and thus leaks like a sieve.
One obvious name has commanded the most media attention – that of Bruno Le Maire, presently the economy and finance minister – Macron’s old job under François Hollande – who was recalled from Bali in the middle of a Far East trade mission. Le Maire has one thing above all going for him: experience. He previously served as agriculture minister and Secretary of State for Europe during the presidency of Nicolas Sarkozy. By contrast, most elected members of Macron’s hand-made La République en Marche arrived in the National Assembly as teachers, civil servants or local councillors.
Other names on the list of papabile include Franck Rieter, a personal friend of Edouard Philippe’s; Gabriel Attall, at present the En Marche official spokesman; Marc Fesneau, secretary-general of MoDem, the junior coalition partner; and Juliette Méadel and Didier Guillame, former Socialist Party deputies considered loyal to Manuel Valls, the former prime minister under Hollande, who has since fled France to run for mayor of Barcelona. The irony is that Valls himself would have made an excellent choice as interior minister, but, pointedly, was not asked. Instead, he has become France’s King Over the Water, or in his case, the Pyrenees.
“It’s not a short-list, it’s a kill list,” was the off-the-record comment of one insider quoted in Le Parisien. Macron wants to be sure that whoever he picks can (a) be trusted to fill one of the most difficult roles in government – which De Gaulle used to say required the ability to shoot first and ask questions afterwards – and (b) stay the course during what promises to be a difficult and challenging 12 months.
In the meantime, the Benalla affair rumbles on while in the Assembly En Marche deputies continue to show their disquiet over Macron’s monarchical style and the resulting top-down administration.
The Government is fortunate that both the centre-right Républicains, led by the lack-lustre Laurent Wauquiez, and the recently renamed Rassemblement National, still fronted by Marine Le Pen, have yet to recover their poise after the electoral disasters of 2017. The abject collapse of the Socialist Party and its virtual replacement on the Left by the marxist France Insoumise of Jean-Luc Mélenchon has also worked in Macron’s favour. But the fall in the President’s approval ratings from a high of 65 per cent to a new low of 30 per cent only underlines the reality that in politics a time of victories can easily give way to a sequence of disappointment and defeat.
A new interior minister is likely to be only the first move in what Macron must hope will be a deeper, policy-driven revival.
