Macron’s new cabinet: how a vintage French farce unfolded

If Westminster-based political columnists and sketch-writers sometimes feel there are no more jokes to be made about Boris Johnson and the Tory Party, they might consider an exchange scheme with their opposite numbers in Paris. 

The drama – actually more of a farce – behind the formation of the new French government could have been written by Georges Feydeau rather than Victor Hugo, who would have searched in vain for the tragedy. 

Consider, first, the story of how Emmanuel Macron, having been re-elected as French President, finally got round to selecting a prime minister to replace the outgoing Jean Castex. 

Macron was clear about one thing. He wanted a woman to play the role. All previous prime ministers, save one (Édith Cresson, and she only for ten months), had been men, and, with the parliamentary elections due in June, it was time for his administration to show its feminist side. 

But who was there? What choice did he have? According to Olivier Faye, writing in Le Monde, the President’s first choice was Catherine Vautrin, a former vice-president of the National Assembly, who had served as a minister under Jacques Chirac and now headed Reims metropolitan council. Over a one-to-one lunch at the Élysée on 12 May, he sounded out the 60-year-old centrist and was so impressed that he offered her the job on the spot. 

So far, so good. Vautrin was issued with a security detail by the ministry of the interior and immediately began calling around, looking for allies who might fill various cabinet slots. Her appointment, she was assured, would be officially confirmed on Monday, 16 May. 

Sadly for her, it was not to be. Not only were the remaining leftists in Macron’s En Marche party upset that for the third time in a row the PM’s job had been offered to a veteran of the centre-right, but it was revealed – quelle horreur! – that Vautrin had once joined a demonstration against gay marriage.  

She was out and Elisabeth Borne, a noted feminist and grandchild of the Holocaust, was in. Borne was faintly of the Left. She had flirted with Socialism in her youth and had served as chief of staff to Ségolène Royal, a senior minister during the presidency of Royal’s erstwhile partner François Hollande. Gender aside, she was a known commodity, familiar with the Macron agenda, who had already proved her worth under the direction of both Castex and his predecessor, Édouard Philippe. 

That, you might suppose, ought to have been an end to the matter. Politics is a rough trade. One day you’re in, the next you’re out. But no. Macron now had to deal with the injured pride of the agriculture minister Julien Denormandie, his chouchou (favourite), also known as Juju, a co-founder of En Marche, who all of a sudden announced that if he didn’t get the top job, he was off. 

Macron pleaded with him. He could have any other job he wanted. He could even have finance and the economy, making him, in effect, co-equal with Borne. But DeNormandie, 41, wasn’t having it. Instead, he said, tweeting from the disappointed ministers’ playbook, he was taking time off from politics “to devote more time to his family”. 

Oh well. You win some and you lose some. But Juju would get over it, and in the meantime, he could offer the agriculture gig to Marc Fesneau, a party loyalist, who had previously served as minister for relations with the National Assembly and was overdue for promotion. 

The problem now was that Bruno Le Maire, the finance minister, formerly a member of the centre-right Republicans, had just found out that his job had been offered to Denormandie as a sop for not getting the post of prime minister. He was not pleased. Even when Macron assured him that he was his chosen number two, and always would be, he couldn’t help wondering what he would have ended up with if Juju had said yes. It was like an episode of Call My Agent. 

Further down the cabinet list, daggers are already out over Macron’s choice as education minister. Pap Ndiaye, a leftist exponent of critical race theory and advocate of wokisme, is an academic historian, born in France to a Senegalese father. He honed his anti-racist credentials while studying at the University of Virginia and could have been created by an algorithme designed to aggrivate and frustrate the leaders of the far-right in France, Marine le Pen and Éric Zemmour. 

All this before the parliamentary elections, which Macron and En Marche – now rebranded as Renaissance – have to win if the new cabinet is not to be hoofed out of office on 18 June. 

What next for the sketchwriters? Jean-Luc Mélenchon, the cardigan-wearing Marxist, as prime minister and the story of France for the next five years as a comedy version of Les Misérables?