En Marche takes a sharp turn to the right

Well, he’s just gone ahead and done it. The new French government announced yesterday finally dispenses with the myth that Emmanuel Macron is a President from the political centre. By adding three conservatives from Nicolas Sarkozy’s onetime political circle to his new cabinet led by another Sarkozy protege Jean Castex, Macron has drawn a line under the pretence that he governs without ideology, but rather from the perspective of what works best for France.

Last weekend’s municipal elections came as a shock, if not a total surprise. Macron had foreseen that candidates from his En Marche party would do badly. But he thought that his handling of the coronavirus crisis (masterminded by Castex) would at least keep En Marche in the game. He didn’t expect a wipe-out. The Green Wave that hit towns and cities across the country left Marseille, Lyon, Bordeaux and Strasbourg in the control of left-leaning eco-warriors. The Socialist Anne Hidalgo, meanwhile, romped home as mayor of Paris, as did Martine Aubry, from the Old Left, in Lille.

En Marche was nowhere, while the centre-right conservatives, currently trading under the banner of Les Républicains, held their end up without making any serious inroads.

Most observers, including this one, expected Macron to respond by tacking his government to the green left. He had after all promised a fresh start. And it made sense. If the electorate had clearly moved in a green and socialist direction, why not En Marche? Macron, with his background as an investment banker, has spent the entirety of his presidency denying that he is President of the Rich.

Why then, with the public mood in open support of a green agenda and policies aimed at projecting jobs and workers’ rights, would the nation’s leader make a 45-degree turn to the right?

In doing so, he is throwing down the gauntlet to French voters. “If you didn’t like me as a centrist, how about when I hit you with this?” The incoming cabinet includes ministers from the governments of Jacques Chirac as well as Sarkozy, each of whom will be expected to stand firm as opposition inevitably grows to whatever strategy is adopted to deal with the coming recession caused by Covid.

Macron has been warned of a downturn that is expected to reduce the country’s GNP by as much as 10.6%. Companies large and small are getting ready to shed jobs by the bucketload. Hundreds, possibly thousands, of bars, restaurants and cafés, as well as high street shops, are threatened with closure. France’s unemployment lines, already long, will almost certainly double in the run-up to the 2022 presidential and parliamentary elections.

It might have been assumed that Macron would ease up on his hard-line reform programme, leaving pensions and public sector jobs more or less as they are for the duration of the recession. Instead, he seems to be signalling that he is ready to go for broke.

Castex, a high-fonctionnaire who served as a close confidant to Sarkozy, the King of Bling, is a company man through and through, without a radical bone in his body. As prime minister, he will be a doleful presence at the far end of the cabinet table – reliable, efficient and pliant, a loyalist by nature and a natural conservative.

The new interior minister, replacing the tough but lacklustre Christophe Castaner, a former Socialist, is Gérald Darmanin, newly re-elected as mayor of the northern city of Tourcoing.

Damanin previously served as minister for the public accounts but has now been placed at the centre of the Government at a time when law and order are bound to be a top concern. His job will be to deal with the protests and riots that will surely greet any attempt to suppress the unions and – as seems likely this winter –the gilets-jaunes once they have taken stock of the latest Macron manifesto. Short of a miracle, unrest on the streets must now be considered a near certainty in the months ahead.

Two other Sarkozyite appointees are Brigitte Klinkert as minister for integration within the labour department, and Sébastien Lecornu, who will head the department of overseas territories. Klinkert is nominally a member of En Marche, but according to one friend and colleague in her hometown of Colmar it has been some time since she paid her dues. Lecornu, just 34, accompanied the President on his fact-finding mission around France following the gilets-jaunes protests, when his advice on dealing with ordinary people was considered invaluable.

Not all leftists have been sacked. Bruno Le Maire, an erstwhile Socialist, remains finance and employment minister. He is something of a bruiser. and the veteran Jean-Yves Le Drian is still at the helm as foreign minister. But there are now four fewer from the left in the Cabinet than there were last week when Édouard Philippe was prime minister.

Macron will no doubt continue to insist that he is a pragmatist, “neither of the left nor the right,” and there is little doubt that he will seek to appease the Green lobby over the course of the next few months, most obviously by supporting measures proposed in Brussels by the European Commission.

But the direction of travel is now clear. The President is a conservative, just like his predecessor but one, Nicolas Sarkozy, in whose close company he has been observed several times this year. It would be an irony if Sarko, having been ignominiously ejected from the Élysée in 2012 by the equally hapless François Hollande, ended up getting a virtual second term courtesy of his new friend, the banker Macron.

The Castex government, with the President pulling the strings, is, on average, older than the outgoing administration. It is also markedly more feminist, with seventeen women ministers against just fifteen men. But the big question is, what will En Marche’s deputies in the National Assembly think of the shift in emphasis from centre-right to mainstream right?

Many were already disturbed by the President’s unwillingness to compromise with the unions and the gilets-jaunes over the last two tumultuous years. Some, indeed, had gone so far as to resign the party whip. Many will be now looking to the Élysée to come up with a jobs package designed around the need to protect employment at a time of unprecedented stress. They will be sorely disappointed if what they get is a business-oriented approach that keeps big corporations and the banks happy but permits unemployment to mushroom, especially among the ranks of the under-25s.

It could be that Macron will confound his critics and come up with a raft of carefully-crafted policies not dissimilar to those announced by the Johnson government in the UK. Maybe that is to be the signature message of Europe’s New Right. Stranger things have happened. Or it could be that he sees himself, rather than the Republicans, as the flagbearer for conservatism in 2022.

He may even be counting on the possibility that the low turnout in the municipals disguised a large measure of support for his government that will reveal itself when the time is right.

But if, as he enters his last 21 months in office, he hopes to win the votes of ordinary workers, the unemployed and ethnic minorities at a time of worsening economic crisis, why do so from the further right rather than from the more easily available soft left? This week’s reshuffle has thrown up more questions than answers.