The President of France, Emmanuel Macron, has appointed Élisabeth Borne, 61, prime minister and head of a first ‘combat government’, called to present the great battle of the legislative elections of the 12th and the next June 19.
Borne responds without fanfare to the first robot portrait advanced by Macron: “Social, environmentalist, worker…” Political and institutional figure at the heart of the entire presidential political project.
Borne began her political career as an adviser to Lionel Jospin, in his time as Socialist Prime Minister. Later, Ella Borne was director of the cabinet of Ségolène Royal, former minister of ecology of the father of her children, François Hollande socialist president, between 2014 and 2015.
A civil engineer by training, that very moderate institutional and ecological left-wing experience closed, the new head of the French government, worked in several public companies, definitively left the PS and ended up joining La República En Marcha (LREM), the first party of Macron.
In 2019, she was the Macronian Minister of the Ecological Transition, to occupy the Labor portfolio a year later. Her experience, efficiency and reformist sensibility, once on the ultra-moderate environmental left, allow her to be respected by both the traditional left and the traditional right.
Macron, for his part, has also chosen Borne as a highly symbolic figure: the second woman to serve as prime minister and head of government in the history of the Fifth Republic.
The eight presidents of the Fifth Republic, founded between 1958 and 1962, Charles de Gaulle, Georges Pompidou, Valéry Giscard d’Estaing, François Mitterrand, Jacques Chirac, Nicolas Sarkozy, François Hollande and Emmanuel Macron, had twenty-four prime ministers but only one female head of Government, Édith Cresson, Prime Minister of François Mitterrand between 1991 and 1992.
In his day, Cresson was a symbol dynamited by the ‘elephants’ of French socialism. Analyzing Macron’s decision, Cresson stated: “It’s a very big risk. The French political class is very macho. And the position of head of government is very hard and thankless.
In the United Kingdom and Germany, two women, Margaret Thatcher and Angela Merkel, occupied the highest hierarchies of the State, for many years, a long time ago. In France, presidents and prime ministers have been men for decades. Macron has also wanted to send a highly symbolic message of renewal in this field.
Appointed prime minister and head of government on Monday afternoon, Borne will have to form the new government team very quickly, following the very strict and precise instructions and guidelines of President Macron.
First urgent political combat task: launch the emblematic reforms that could influence the legislative elections next June.
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