What arachnid bit him? At 66, comfortably seated in the chair of the Caisse des Dépôts, Éric Lombard has decided to sit in the ejection seat of the Ministry of the Economy. His predecessor, Antoine Armand, only remained in office for three months, carried away by the censorship of Michel Barnier’s government. A threat that once again hangs over François Bayrou’s team, more in a hurry than ever to have the 2025 budget adopted.
However, the new boss of Bercy “approaches this with great serenity”. As he told Le Point, he sees himself “a bit like the spider-man” from the famous American comic strip, whose mantra he claims: “Great power comes with great responsibility.”
In his new costume, Éric Lombard is already trying to show flexibility. According to PS Senator Patrice Kanner, he gave hope, with his Budget Minister, Amélie de Montchalin, to the Socialists received on Monday January 6 “a proposal for modification”, or even “development of the pension reform”. Way of immediately establishing the “fruitful dialogue” that he wishes to deepen “with the left-wing parties” rather than with the National Rally, at the risk of opening a front with Marine Le Pen, who sees it as a “very bad signal.”
“Always a Rocardian”
However, the applicant had warned, as soon as he took office at the end of December: “I will carry my convictions, have no doubt about it”. And to cite, at the top of his priorities, the “social emergency” before that of the deficit and the debt.
Because under the mask of the financier, former director of BNP Paribas and Generali, the man has, it is said, kept his heart on the left. “Once a Rocardian, always a Rocardian”, affirms his long-time friend, the former president of the Insurance Federation Bernard Spitz, met on the benches of the preparatory classes for the grandes écoles, before Éric Lombard opted for HEC.
“He did not join the Ena but he was always interested in public affairs,” adds this faithful person, then working in ministerial offices, at the turn of the 1980s and 1990s, then within the Gracques, a group of senior socio-liberal civil servants founded in 2007 in the – unfulfilled – hope of a Royal-Bayrou alliance.
In this circle gravitated, at the time, the young financial inspector Emmanuel Macron, who would ally himself, ten years later, with François Bayrou, before appointing Éric Lombard to the Caisse des Dépôts.
However, the big financier “is not prisoner of a political posture”, which makes him, in the eyes of Bernard Spitz, “the best placed” to “find the path to economic and political compromise”.
He is someone who is deeply political but he is not a politician
“A friend in life”, for Olivier Faure
At the very least, it could “allow the government to buy time”, by “hearing a music a little different from the right-wing drift of Macronism”, wants to believe the former Renaissance MP Gilles Le Gendre. From the business leader Lombard, known within Generali, he retains, moreover, a “fairly obsessive desire to put his convictions, rather left-wing, at the service of his actions”.
“Eric is a real left-wing guy”, who “loves politics” and “knows how to negotiate”, adds former Macronist minister Olivier Dussopt, who also came from the socialist ranks and who claims to be his friend.
He is not the only one: the first secretary of the PS, Olivier Faure, was forced to recognize that the new Minister of the Economy was “a man of the left” and “a friend in life”.
With such support, Éric Lombard could have crossed the Rubicon sooner. “His name was mentioned at certain times”, notably for the Barnier government but “he did not want to enter into a configuration which seemed to him to be in the hands of the RN”, relates the former socialist minister Michel Sapin, who was recruited as an advisor in the early 1990s.
“Today, he is convinced that it can be different. He is betting on optimism,” continues this other Rocardian, who notes, however, that Éric Lombard “is someone who is deeply political but he is not a politician.” Nor a superman.
