Will Le Maire follow the leader all the way to the Élysée?

Having served six years, and counting, as minister for the economy, Bruno Le Maire is the most experienced and senior member of Emmanuel Macron’s top team, second in the hierarchy only to the current prime minister, Elisabeth Borne. He has presided over the French economy during one of the most challenging periods in its history, maintaining a measure of growth, however slight, into the post-Covid era while holding unemployment to a rate of just 8.2 per cent, considerably below the level he inherited from … Emmanuel Macron. 

Given that Macron and Le Maire have worked closely together throughout their shared time in office and that the President has never been shy of co-opting the achievements of others, it might be assumed that all is well between them. 

But not a bit of it. Instead, according to what might be dubbed “informed” gossip, Macron has taken to complaining that Le Maire is occupying too much space in the headlines, even, it is said, referring to him as “this little cartouche,” a dismissal that suggests either a spent bullet or an easily fitted refill for the office printer. 

As is frequently the case in politics, the reason for the falling out has little to do with policy and everything to do with rivalry and ambition. Macron loves being President but is keenly aware that his second term, like his first, has been hobbled by circumstances beyond his control – in this case Russia’s invasion of Ukraine – as well as by his determination to press ahead with a deeply unpopular increase in the state retirement age from 62 to 64.  

As he starts to look ahead to his legacy, he frets that he is already running out of time. If he doesn’t get pension reform – his signature legislation – onto the statute books this year, he will, in duck terms, be in sore need of a crutch. More than that, En Marche, the political movement he first sketched out on the back of an envelope during a train ride to Bordeaux in 2016, could vanish, like him, in 2027, leaving the political centre wide open to new leadership and fresh ideas. 

But who could provide the necessary inspiration for such a reset? 

Step forward Bruno Le Maire. The 53-year-old economy minister is at least as ambitious as his boss. The main difference between them is that Macron vaulted to the presidency from relatively humble beginnings while Le Maire, born to the purple, rose steadily through the system, pushing all the right buttons on his way to the top. 

On policy, what truly separates them? Le Maire is probably a more orthodox conservative, whereas Macron (“neither right not left”) is liable to experiment, his only constants being a perversive belief in globalism and Big Business. Last week, the President is reported to have chided Le Maire for being excessively generous to French boulangeres who claimed they couldn’t afford to keep their ovens fired up without additional help to pay their electricity bills. Bread is important in France, where the ready procurement of an affordable baguette is thought of as a basic human right. Even so, bread-based disputes ought not to be mentioned in the same breath as an increase in the retirement age or tanks to Ukraine. 

Key to the estrangement is the fact that Le Maire, the son of a top executive of Total – one of the world’s largest oil companies – grew up in the swanky Paris suburb of Neuilly-sur-Seine and moved effortlessly upwards via a leading Lycée, l’Ecole normale supérieure (ENS) – where superiority is considered normal – and ENA (l’École nationale d’administration), the finishing school for France’s ruling class. 

Macron, by contrast, is the son of a doctor and a provincial academic from unfashionable Amiens. He was schooled locally until being sent by his parents to a Paris Lycée following their discovery that, aged 15, he was in a dangerous liaison with his drama teacher (now his wife). Having secured a rare “trés bien”  in his bac, Macron failed, twice, to win a place at ENS and was only accepted to ENA after graduating from the University of Paris-Ouest Nanterre and being accepted by the top-rated Science Po. 

In career terms, Le Maire started as a fonctionnaire at the foreign ministry before becoming an adviser to prime minister Dominique de Villepin and, shortly after, his chief of staff. With Nicolas Sarkozy in the Élysée, he found himself appointed minister for Europe, minister for agriculture and, in the fullness of time, campaign manager for François Fillon during the latter’s ill-fated bid to be President in 2017. 

Macron, a decade later, went from being a civil servant to working for Rothschild’s as an investment banker, making several million euros in just three years before accepting an offer out of the blue to be François Hollande’s economy minister. It was as a minister at the heart of government that he identified a better way forward for France, adumbrated on an envelope and soon after expanded into a new-Blairite third way. 

Stuck in opposition, Le Maire could see which way the wind was blowing and was quick to climb aboard Macron’s bandwagon. The two have worked in rough harmony ever since. If Le Maire still believes the current President to be “an empty shell,” which was how he described him during the 2017 campaign, he has not said as much in public in the years since. But with Macron bound to leave the stage in 2027, taking Macronisme with him, the Neuilly-sur-Seine brat is sure to be working on how best to win the conch for himself. His bid for the presidency would most likely be at the head of yet another iteration of the centre-right, conceivably following a merger with the (somewhat revived) Républicains, led for now by the prickly right-winger Éric Ciotti. 

But between now and then, the great retirement debate rumbles on, bearing with it the fortunes of Emmanuel Macron. The eighth president of the Fifth Republic is far from done. He could yet surprise sceptics and cynics alike by actually putting his name to an historic reform. But if he fails, he will know who’s waiting in the wings.

Nothing, of course, is set in stone in high politics. Macron came out of nowhere and Le Maire could well find that someone whose name he now barely knows will end up as the centre-right contender next time round. Maybe the Left will finally get its act together, or Marine Le Pen – currently serving her time as an avowedly responsible member of the National Assembly – will win the presidency at the fourth time of asking. 

As for Macron, he is still only 45 and will surely have ambitions that extend beyond 2027. He could end up as President of the European Commission or Council. Just as plausibly, he could might be called to chair the International Monetary Fund or to serve as an interventionist secretary-general of the United Nations. Or he could be recruited to head Goldman Sachs and make himself some serious money. For as the surprise Nobel Prize winner Bob Dylan famously wrote, the wheel is in spin and there’s no tellin’ who that it’s namin’.    

Write to us with your comments to be considered for publication at letters@reaction.life