French President Emmanuel Macron has appointed the current Minister of Labor, Elisabeth Borne as prime minister. Borne, 61, will succeed Jean Castex, having previously held high positions in the Macron era as Minister of Transport in 2017 and Minister of Ecological Transition between 2019 and 2020. It is the second time in French history that a woman has taken office , more than 30 years after French President Francois Mitterand opted for the name of Edith Cresson.
Is Macron trying to get closer to the left?
As prime minister, Borne’s job will be above all to monitor France’s climate objectives, after Paris failed for years to cut its emissions targets, but the reform of the pension system is among the other more inconvenient dossiers.
According to the international media, Borne’s choice is part of Macron’s strategy of rapprochement with a left-wing electorate, the same one that agreed to vote him in the second round of the last presidential elections only as a barrier to Marine Le Pen’s radical right.
Borne, for a long time a militant of the Socialist Party, is considered a breaking figure with respect to the reputation suffered by Macron, both with respect to social policies and with respect to an increasingly shaky gender equity in the country. Cresson herself, now 88, had declared in an interview that a prime minister would need “a lot of courage”, given the climate of sexism that penalizes women in politics.
From the Ecole Polytechnique to the premiership
Studied at the École Polytechnique, an engineer graduated from the École Nationale des Ponts et Chaussées, Borne was among other things strategic director of SNCF railways, prefect of the Poitou-Charentes region, president of Parisian public transport Ratp, general director of urban planning at city hall of the capital. You in government, you have conducted various reforms, including the disputed one of the Sncf in 2018 in which you opened up to competition in passenger transport. The appointment of the government team is expected in the coming days.