France gets an unknown new prime minister

AFTER WEEKS of speculation, President Emmanuel Macron has named Jean Castex as France’s new prime minister, replacing Edouard Philippe. To which many in France replied: Jean who? The new head of the French government is currently the centre-right mayor of Prades, a village in the Pyrenees, and a high-level civil servant who was in charge of planning France’s strategy for emerging from lockdown. Almost nobody, except the good folk of Prades, has ever heard of him.

At first glance, Mr Castex is a carbon-copy of his predecessor. Like Mr Philippe, he attended the elite Ecole Nationale d’Administration (ENA), and joined the top layer of the French civil service. Also like Mr Philippe, he hails from the centre-right Republicans party. When Nicolas Sarkozy was president, Mr Castex was his deputy chief of staff at the Elysée Palace.

Although the full shape of the new government has yet to be announced, the appointment of Mr Castex by itself is neither the tilt to the left, nor towards the Greens, that many observers were expecting. On June 28th Mr Macron’s party performed miserably at local elections while the Greens surged in big cities, the president’s natural political base. There is pressure on Mr Macron both to put greenery closer to the centre of policy-making and to keep up higher public spending on social measures after the covid-19 crisis. It is hard to detect in Mr Castex the embodiment of the “new course” that Mr Macron keeps saying he wants to steer—unless, that is, Mr Macron intends simply to run everything himself.

One aspect that does distinguish Mr Castex from Mr Philippe is his roots in la France profonde. Mr Macron, with his sharp suits and past spell as an investment banker, is linked in the French mind to the world of the metropolitan elite. Mr Castex returns every weekend to his village in the Pyrenees, and was re-elected mayor there at the first round with a whopping 76% of the vote. After the gilets jaunes protests, and the charge that Mr Macron is disconnected from people on the ground, Mr Castex may—possibly—be able to help ease such tensions. He was also expected to appoint as chief of staff Nicolas Revel, who worked with Mr Macron at the Elysée under François Hollande, a Socialist president, and also ran the office of Bertrand Delanoë when he was Socialist mayor of Paris. This would bring some balance on the left.

The broader question behind all this is why Mr Macron felt the need to change his prime minister at all. Bar a few policy differences, such as one over Mr Philippe’s decision to lower the speed limit on rural roads, which helped to provoke the gilets jaunes, he and his outgoing prime minister worked together well. Mr Philippe had become a respected figure, more popular than his boss, which indeed may have been part of the problem. Under the French Fifth Republic, presidents have traditionally used their prime ministers to act as a shock absorber when things go wrong. In Mr Philippe’s case, it was Mr Macron who sustained the damage. The gap in their respective approval ratings widened further during lockdown. By June, a poll average put Mr Philippe on 49%, and Mr Macron on just 39%.

As if to confirm the point, at recent local elections Mr Philippe was elected mayor of the port of Le Havre with a resounding 59% of the vote. This has also secured him a dignified landing point. Although some suspect that Mr Philippe’s new job could supply him with a base from which to prepare his own independent political future, there is now talk that Mr Philippe may even take on a “mission” for Mr Macron to sort out the centrist political party and its allies.

Mr Castex, meanwhile, will need all the skills of efficiency and finesse that his supporters attribute to him. France seems to have emerged from lockdown while keeping covid-19, so far at least, under control. But its economy could still end up shrinking by 11% this year, and job losses have only just begun to be felt, as furlough schemes and public subsidies are rolled back. Mr Philippe took on the job in 2017 at a moment of great hope. Mr Castex inherits it in far more testing circumstances. The autumn, Mr Macron warned on July 2nd, “will be very tough.”■