PARIS — If anyone’s looking for short-term employment, there’s a prestigious job open in Paris with perks and accommodation included.
French President Emmanuel Macron’s office said he will choose a new prime minister by Friday evening. That lucky individual will replace Sébastien Lecornu, whose government resigned Monday after barely lasting 14 hours. Lecornu’s tenure as PM came in at 27 days.
The next PM will be Macron’s sixth head of government since the French president won reelection in 2022. He or she will face an uphill battle trying to negotiate a budget that brings down the French deficit as fears swirl that the eurozone’s second largest economy has become ungovernable.
Here are some profiles that are on the docket.
A team captain
Jean-Louis Borloo, a former minister who once owned the Valenciennes football club, has been floated as an option in Elysée circles in recent days.
One of his biggest selling points: “He won’t be the man who has to ask the president permission to take a leak,” said a government adviser, granted anonymity to speak candidly.
Borloo, like Macron, comes from France’s political center, but he doesn’t belong to the French president’s political team. He founded UDI, a small centrist party, and is seen as much more independent from Macron than other centrists.
Borloo is someone who can “speak to the left” and won’t be seen as “so openly as a Macron lieutenant,” said a parliamentary adviser from Macron’s Renaissance party.
As someone who has distanced himself from daily politics, he is not a threat to France’s (many) presidential hopefuls.
Conservative leader Bruno Retailleau said he had spoken with Borloo on Thursday morning and described the 74-year-old as “disruptive” and neither left-wing nor close to Macron — his two key criteria for supporting a new premier.
France, however, needs a prime minister who is battle-ready, and Borloo left frontline politics in 2014. And the center-left Socialist Party, who may hold the next government’s fate in their hands, are signaling that Borloo would be unacceptable.
PM probability:
A warrior monk
Sébastien Lecornu swears he is not interested. But there are rumblings that he’s vying for his former job. Lecornu resigned from his post as prime minister on Monday morning — setting off the current crisis — but was then tasked by Macron to find a way out of the mess in 48 hours.
The 39-year-old then spent the next two days meeting with political factions across the spectrum and has appeared upbeat about the talks in his few media appearances. He said in a primetime interview Wednesday that he was working on a draft budget that could be a starting point for debates in parliament.
If things are going so well, why would he go?
That was the gist of the speculation, which peaked this week when his aides were forced to deny reporting by the daily Le Parisien that he was about to be reappointed as prime minister.
The former Armed Forces minister tried himself to tamp down those rumors during his Wednesday evening interview, saying: “I’m a warrior monk, my mission is over.”
There’s reason to believe him. Lecornu is seen as Macron’s minion, and appointing a PM so closely linked to the president — whose popularity hit a new low this week — would be like pouring gasoline on the current political conflagration.
PM probability:
A classmate from the opposition
Will the left finally get their shot at running France? This week, there were murmurs the French president might be considering appointing a left-wing PM after the downfall of three consecutive center and center-right governments in the past year.
Boris Vallaud, the leader of the Socialist Party group in the National Assembly, might fit the bill.
He was one of Macron’s classmates at the elite Ecole National d’Administration, a sort of finishing school for French presidents, and the duo worked together under former President François Hollande at the Elysée before Macron spurned the Socialists to start his own centrist party.
Vallaud himself said the Socialists have “expressed their availability to run the country, with a change of political direction.”
And that’s part of the problem.
Macron doesn’t want a PM who will break from his political agenda. The conservatives have also indicated they won’t be on board with a prime minister from the left, so a Socialist PM would require tacit support from the centrists and the hard-left France Unbowed.
PM probability:
A dash of Draghi
Another possible way forward for the French president would be to appoint a technocratic PM like Mario Draghi who would be able to forge a compromise and bring down the political temperature.
Pierre Moscovici, the head of the France’s national audit body, might be the man for the job. A former Socialist, Moscovici has a gleaming resume: he’s been European commissioner and minister under Hollande, a Socialist, and Jacques Chirac, a conservative.
As head of France’s Court of Auditors he has his finger on the economic pulse of the country and would know where to cut to bring down France’s deficit.
An added asset? Moscovici might be available for employment, as he is due to leave his post by the end of the year.
PM probability:
Sarah Paillou contributed to this report.
The post Who wants to be the next prime minister of France? appeared first on Politico.
