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Emmanuel Macron names Édouard Philippe as French prime minister
Emmanuel Macron picks rightwinger Édouard Philippe as PM
(about 3 hours later)
France’s new centrist president, Emmanuel Macron, has appointed the conservative mayor of Le Havre, Édouard Philippe, as prime minister.
France’s centrist president Emmanuel Macron has appointed a prime minister from the right to lead his bid to win a parliamentary majority in June’s elections and push through his plans to loosen strict labour laws.
Philippe, 46, comes from the centre-right faction of Les Républicains – the party led by Nicolas Sarkozy until last year that saw its candidate, François Fillon, knocked out in the first round of the presidential election.
Édouard Philippe, 46, the mayor of the Normandy port town Le Havre, comes from Les Républicains, the party that was headed by Nicolas Sarkozy until last year and whose candidate, François Fillon, was knocked out in the presidential election first round.
He is seen within his party as a centrist, and supported the moderate former prime minister Alain Juppé in the party’s primary race to choose a presidential candidate last year.
Known as a centrist, Philippe supported the moderate, centre-right former prime-minister, Alain Juppé, in the party’s presidential primary race last year.
As a student, Philippe was briefly an activist for the social democrat line within the French Socialist party before leaving to join the right. He has been a member of parliament for Normandy, where he abstained during the vote to legalise same-sex marriage in France in 2013. He has never held a government post.
His appointment is seen as a strategic move by the French president to destabilise the already divided French right and win over rightwing politicians to his La République en Marche (La REM) movement.
The Normandy port city’s mayor shares Macron’s elite educational background – he studied at Paris’s prestigious political science institute Sciences Po, then attended the exclusive Ecole Nationale de l’Administration, the civil service graduate school seen as production line for the French elite. The son of two teachers, he spent part of his childhood in Bonn in Germany where his father was for a time headteacher of the French lycée.
Macron, who served as economy minister under the Socialist former president François Hollande, has attracted dozens of centre-left MPs to his new movement and needed to reach out to the right. The move was also calculated to lure parliamentary hopefuls from Les Républicains in order to try to secure the majority he needs to enact his manifesto promises to provide more flexibility for business.
Philippe, who has worked for the French nuclear company Areva, has also co-authored novels.
Taking office at the grandiose prime minister’s residence of Le Hôtel Matignon, Philippe stated pointedly: “I am a man of the right”, but added that he respected politicians on the left and was driven by “the greater good”.
The prime minister’s first task will be to lead the fierce battle in the June parliamentary elections to win a majority for Macron’s fledgling political movement, La République En Marche (La REM). Without a majority, Macron would struggle to push through his planned changes to labour laws, pensions, education and the system of unemployment benefits.
His appointment is a blow to Les Républicains, who have been trying to regroup after the presidential vote and prevent defections to Macron’s camp.
The choice of a mayor from the right means some figures from Les Républicains may now jump ship and stand for the parliamentary election under Macron’s banner. This would worsen the divisions inside the fractured French right.
Party officials insisted Philippe’s move was strictly a personal decision, but about 20 MPs broke ranks and issued a statement urging Les Républicains and centre-right allies to accept Macron’s “outstretched hand”, saying the right needed to “take the full measure of the political transformation taking place before their eyes”.
The secretary general of Les Républicains, Bernard Accoyer, reacted coolly to the appointment, saying it was an ambiguous move. “This is an individual decision. It is not a political agreement,” Accoyer said shortly after the announcement.
Philippe was born in Rouen in Normandy and based his political career in the northern port town of Le Havre where his grandfather was a docker. The son of two teachers, he speaks German and spent part of his childhood in Bonn when his father was the headteacher of the French lycée. He comes from the same university background as Macron: he studied at Paris’s prestigious, political science institute, Sciences Po, then attended the exclusive École nationale d’administration, the civil service graduate school seen as a factory of the French elite.
“Will this new prime minister support the candidates of En Marche! of the president ... or will he support the candidates of the Republicans-UDI, the candidates of his own political family?”
As a student, Philippe was briefly a social democrat activist within the French Socialist party before moving to the right. He has never held a government post and is relatively little-known outside his fiefdom in the north, which helps Macron present him as a new face as part of his promise to renew politics.
Macron, who has set out his own political line as “neither left nor right”, has sought what he calls a “pragmatic” alliance of people from all backgrounds and parties to push through his pro-business reforms. He has sought to benefit from the weakness of France’s traditional left and right governing parties, which were both knocked out of the presidential election at the first round amid anti-establishment anger among voters.
Philippe has veered between politics and the private sector including working for an American law firm and holding a senior position at the French nuclear company Areva.
But Macron – who served as economy minister in the outgoing Socialist government of former president François Hollande before resigning last year – has until now attracted dozens of centre-left MPs to his movement, and needed to reach out to the right.
The French left and the greens reacted to the appoinment by saying he was too rightwing and not focussed enough on green issues, citing his time working in the nuclear industry. The government lineup, which will be announced on Tuesday, will show exactly what importance Macron intends to place on environmental issues.
Macron, a newcomer to politics who was unknown three years ago, has promised to renew France’s political class and include more women. He is under pressure to ensure a number of women hold senior positions in the new French government to be announced on Tuesday. Macron has previously said his government would be 50% female. His key cabinet and senior adviser positions in the Élysée, announced on Sunday, were all men.
Philippe has co-authored two novels set in the political sphere. One, published 10 years ago, described the French prime minister’s office and residence of Matignon as “a type of hell: golden, sought after by many and satisfying for the ego, but hell nonetheless.” He described a prime minister quickly “submerged” and drowning under “a mass of information”.
Macron will travel to Berlin on Monday afternoon to meet the German chancellor, Angela Merkel, to discuss EU reform and kickstart the Franco-German relationship.
Although he has been a longstanding advocate of what Macron has defined as a new form of pragmatic “neither left nor right politics”, Philippe was occasionally barbed about Macron during the campaign in columns he wrote for the leftwing daily Libération. He said Macron had impressed with his “power of seduction and reformist rhetoric” but that it was wrong to compare him to John F Kennedy who “had more charisma”.
It is traditional for French leaders to make Berlin their first European trip, but the pro-European Macron wants to boost the Franco-German motor at the heart of Europe and press for closer cooperation, including creating a parliament and budget for the eurozone.
As a member of parliament for Normandy, Philippe abstained during the vote to legalise same-sex marriage in France in 2013, and the feminist group, Osez Le Feminisme, has complained that he abstained in 2014 on a vote for a sweeping gender equality law.
Sylvie Goulard, a French liberal MEP who has been advising Macron on Europe, said the new president wanted the motor “to accelerate and go back to times when it was more active”.
Macron is now under pressure to ensure that he fulfils his promise to appoint more women to senior positions in the new government. Macron said half of the ministers would be women but his key cabinet and senior advisor positions in the Elysée, announced on Sunday, were all men.
Goulard, who brokered Macron’s meeting with Merkel in March, said the two countries needed to work together on the economy, defence, climate change and counter-terrorism, against a backdrop of uncertainty. She said: “It is more than ever a message to work together and it is also deeply in the German national interest and the French national interest.”
Tensions are likely to emerge over deepening integration in the eurozone. Macron favours eurobonds, a form of shared debt that Germany again ruled out the day after the French outsider’s stunning victory. Though little eurozone reform is likely until after September’s German elections.
Macron will also be seeking German support for his plans to “relaunch Europe”, described by Goulard as a top priority that involved greater convergence on tax and social policy. “It is clear that you cannot just rely on the winners of the globalisation in Europe to make the European project develop further.”
Failing to answer those questions means “we might lose the single market – and this is exactly what is happening in the UK”, she said.
In Berlin, Macron is likely to encounter familiar German concerns about taxpayers being made to pay for debts racked up in other European states. But he also arrives in the capital as a familiar face who has had plenty of opportunities to find areas where Germany’s resolve on fiscal matters is more brittle.
Between 2012 and 2014, as a presidential adviser, Macron was closely involved in Franco-German discussions over how to go about creating deeper economic integration in the core of the eurozone – plans that later stalled because of Hollande’s domestic problems and more urgent diplomatic crises in eastern Ukraine.
