On Monday evening, French President Emmanuel Macron accepted the resignation of Prime Minister Élisabeth Borne, who had been in office for about a year and a half: in 2022 she became the second woman, after Édith Cresson, to hold this role in the history of the country. The fact that the prime minister has resigned means that the government she led will be dissolved: on Tuesday morning Macron will announce who will replace her and will also have to decide which ministers to keep and which to replace.
Borne’s resignation was not particularly surprising. For weeks Macron had hinted that there would soon be a government reshuffle and many believed that Borne would be the one to be removed.
In the letter that accompanied the announcement, Borne herself wrote that she had resigned after Macron had “made her aware of his desire to appoint a new prime minister”, adding, immediately afterwards, that she “had to resign” from a “mission” that “passionates” her, a formula already used by the Socialist Michel Rocard when he was pushed to resign by President François Mitterrand in May 1991. The reference, write the French newspapers, means that Borne, appointed in May 2022, he reluctantly left his position. “They fired me,” Michel Rocard had told the press at the time.
It is likely that the French president, who has long had major popularity problems due to various reforms and controversial measures that he strongly supported, wants to appoint a new government in the hope of recovering some consensus in view of the European elections, which will take place will be held at the beginning of June: at the moment the polls in France they give the Rassemblement National, the far-right party led by Marine Le Pen, the advantage. Macron also still has three years of presidency ahead of him, as well as a year that promises to be rather complex due to the Olympics, which will be hosted in Paris and – for some individual sports – in other areas of France in the summer and will get a lot of media attention .
In this context it is easier to understand why he wanted to dismiss a prime minister who had become deeply unpopular during her tenure.
Borne is a historic exponent of the French Socialist Party, who later moved to Macron’s party, and a well-known public sector manager and former Minister of Transport, Energy Transition and Labour. During her mandate she had carried out several controversial reforms at Macron’s request, and had been harshly criticized for having often resorted to article 49.3 of the Constitution, a legislative procedure that allows the approval of a text to be forced without going through a vote of deputies.
The pension reform, promulgated by the government in April 2023 after weeks of very strong protests and political tensions, had for example been passed thanks to article 49.3. Second a calculation of The worldin eighteen months the Borne government invoked article 49.3 twenty-three times, surpassed in frequency only by Michel Rocard’s government, which activated article 49.3 twenty-eight times between 1988 and 1991.
Added to this is the fact that Borne led a minority government and needed external support from the centre-right Républicains in parliament. In December she found herself having to make major concessions to the far right, modifying an immigration reform that the Rassemblement National had previously considered too lax in order to obtain the votes needed to pass it through parliament. In its new formulation, the reform had, among other things, reduced access to subsidies for migrant people, created annual immigration quotas that did not previously exist in France and established that people with dual citizenship convicted of serious crimes can lose their French citizenship .
Under the new law, the government will then have to present its migration policy to parliament every year. Le Pen had defined the approval of the law as an “ideological victory” for his party, while Health Minister Aurélien Rousseau resigned in protest. Already after the vote on the immigration law Claire Gatinois, the main political journalist of The world, he had predicted that Borne’s chances of remaining in government after what had been perceived as a major political failure were very low.
– Read also: What will happen to the Olympic Village in Paris?
The hypothesis is widely believed in the newspapers that Macron could appoint the current Minister of Education, Gabriel Attal, who is 34 years old and who could therefore become the youngest prime minister of the Fifth Republic, i.e. since 1958, in Borne’s place. On 20 December 2023, during a television programme, Emmanuel Macron praised Gabriel Attal’s “energy and courage in waging the necessary battles”, promising him “a government future” and perhaps “a more ambitious destiny”.
Attal is considered very close to Macron. Under the French system, the prime minister has an important role in coordinating government action, but not a strong power of initiative, given that in France the political direction of a government is the prerogative of the president. The first task of the future prime minister will however be to form a new government that promotes the objective announced by Macron in his end-of-year greetings: “industrial, economic, European rearmament”, but also “civic”, especially in relation to the vast school reform project that Gabriel Attal has carried out in recent months.
After the news of Borne’s resignation, Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s far-left party, La France Insoumise, called for the new prime minister to submit to a vote of confidence by the National Assembly, which however is not mandatory in France, and threatened that without this vote “he will present a motion of censure.” The presentation of this motion requires the signature of 58 deputies (one tenth of those elected to the National Assembly), while its possible approval, which would entail the resignation of the government itself, requires 289 votes in favour.