Agnès Pannier-Runacher, a veteran of Macronism in the ecological transition

A survivor of the original Macronism. When on October 16, 2018, Agnès Pannier-Runacher was appointed Secretary of State at Bercy, this private sector executive, who had worked for the General Inspectorate of Finance, was viewed with a little contempt by political professionals. A technocrat without political skill, they murmured.

Six years later, while Richard Ferrand, François Bayrou, Christophe Castaner and Bruno Le Maire have all disappeared from government castings, she will be one of the rare personalities from the first Macron governments to still be present at the table of the council of ministers.

Appointed on Saturday, September 21, to the post of Minister of Ecological Transition, Energy, Climate and Risk Prevention, she was ultimately retained by Prime Minister Michel Barnier. In recent weeks, she had nevertheless been one of the voices of the central bloc to warn against a shift to the right of Macronism. “France is not right-wing. I am not the only one who thinks so, many of my colleagues tell me so too.she had declared to The Express on August 8, 2024, advocating a broad alliance extending to the left. This is a parallel truth that pollutes public debate. [La France] is probably [à droite] in matters of authority, but in economic and social matters, it is on the left.”

Default choice

At first, Michel Barnier would have liked to choose someone from civil society or a left-wing personality for this position. But Agnès Pannier-Runacher finally imposed herself in this major ministry after having multiplied governmental experiences.

At Bercy, she first dealt with crafts and trade between 2018 and 2020. A position where this former ENA graduate, a classmate of the Secretary General of the Elysée, Alexis Kohler, was forced to step aside from certain files related to companies for which she had worked (La Compagnie des Alpes). The same goes for Engie, which employed her husband. Having become Minister Delegate in charge of industry between 2020 and 2022, she managed the vaccine purchasing plan to fight the Covid-19 pandemic, but also the recovery plan for certain sectors, particularly in the energy sector.

A woman of files, Agnès Pannier-Runacher is known for quickly taking ownership of the issues of the sectors for which she is responsible. At the head of a ministry of energy transition from May 2022, she is supposed to carry out the new strategy of President Emmanuel Macron, unveiled a few months earlier in Belfort. For “Getting the country off fossil fuels”France is banking on both a strong revival of the nuclear sector and the development of renewable energies. In addition to the construction of new reactors, the minister is defending an extremely controversial reform of nuclear safety governance (leading to the merger of the Nuclear Safety Authority and the Institute for Radiological Protection and Nuclear Safety) yet to be implemented, and is launching a Nuclear Alliance at European level to promote the atom. At that time, she is also taking this line internationally since she is the one representing France at the negotiations of the Conferences of the Parties (COP) for the climate.

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