the essential
After more than two months of political crisis, Michel Barnier’s new government was officially presented to the French. Between a visit to the Elysée and transfers of power, here is the story of a back-to-school day for 39 new ministers and secretaries of state.
It was on Rue de Varenne in Paris, early this Monday morning, that the 39 new ministers and secretaries of state answered the call for a particularly anticipated return to school for the French. Welcomed at Matignon by a schoolteacher named Michel Bernier, this fragile team, overwhelmingly from Macron’s party and the right, is already experiencing tensions. This pre-return lasted more than two hours, for a “government breakfast”. It is “not a Council of Ministers” but a meeting “over coffee to get to know each other better”, said Michel Barnier. The first instructions have been given. The ministers will have to be “irreproachable and modest” and above all respectful of the other political parties within a “republican, progressive and European” government.
A little tour and then they leave
After Matignon in the morning, the ministers met briefly this Monday for the first time at the Elysée around Emmanuel Macron in the afternoon. This first council, in the winter garden of the presidential palace, lasted less than half an hour, but the team must meet again this Friday from 3 p.m. to 6 p.m. for a “government seminar”, Matignon indicated. During the brief Council of Ministers, the latter assured his team that he would be “there to help (them) succeed”, “with a single compass, the unity of the country and the higher interest of the nation”, reported a participant. Each minister must show “courage”, “audacity” and “ambition”, asserted the head of state who also called for cultivating a “spirit of dialogue”, but also “with the French who have not all made (the) choice” of this alliance between the right and Macronie. “Many of our compatriots have expressed dissenting voices. They must be heard and respected,” he insisted.
Powers pass, messages too
In the sights of many detractors, the new LR Minister of the Interior Bruno Retailleau, holding a firm line on immigration, security and respect for secularism, succeeded Gérald Darmanin at Place Beauvau. A transfer of power during which he hammered home that he wanted to “restore order”. The outgoing Minister of Justice Eric Dupond-Moretti asked that the programming law for justice be “respected” otherwise speaking of “betrayal”, during his handover with the former socialist deputy Didier Migaud. The latter assured that one could be “in favor of budgetary control without calling into question the priorities”.
National Education “will not change course”, promised its new minister Anne Genetet, who succeeded Nicole Belloubet against a backdrop of chronic instability in this position. Health, another priority issue for the government, has passed into the hands of Geneviève Darrieussecq, who cited access to care and prevention as “major axes” of her future policy, while warning that she would not be able to “work miracles” on the budgetary level. On the end-of-life bill, which sparked very lively debates in the Assembly, before these were stopped due to dissolution, she hoped that Parliament could “finish the work” it had started.
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The new Minister of Civil Service Guillaume Kasbarian pleaded for “debureaucratization at all levels”, while his colleague for Labor, Astrid Panosyan-Bouvet, promised a pension reform “more sustainable for all” but without revealing her intentions on that of unemployment insurance, about which she had expressed reservations. While the development of the 2025 budget, which has already been unprecedentedly delayed, is the number one emergency, Michel Barnier has already promised not to “further increase taxes on all French people”. A return to school in a context of tensions for a fragile coalition threatened with censure by the left and the far right and supposed to seduce an Assembly fractured into three blocs at the end of legislative elections.
