Elisabeth Borne was just thirty years old when she saw, for the first and long last time, a woman named Matignon. Technical adviser in 1991 to Lionel Jospin, Minister of Education in the government of Edith Cresson, this polytechnician and engineer of bridges and roadways then began her political career. Thirty-one years later, here she is in turn accessing this strangely atypical title in France and yet familiar to many of our European neighbors, that of Prime Minister.
“I think it’s a very good choice, because she’s a remarkable person, not because she’s a woman”, immediately reacted her distant predecessor on BFM. “She is sufficiently competent and experienced, and in addition she is courageous, which is a very necessary virtue in this function”.
Appointed this Monday, May 16 as head of government, Elisabeth Borne succeeds Jean Castex. “It is the choice of competence in the service of France, of a woman of conviction, action and achievement” soberly announced the Elysée in its press release, Monday afternoon. At 61, this specialist technician of transport passed by the SNCF and the RATP was one of the “pillars” of the previous mandate of Emmanuel Macron. Minister of Transport, Ecological Transition and then Labour, this former prefect of the Poitou-Charentes region has long honed her political skills alongside left-wing personalities.
Advisor to Jospin, Lang and Royal
Loyal to macronism over the past five years, Elisabeth Borne has built her political career in the wake of socialist personalities. Advisor to Lionel Jospin then to Jack Lang in the 90s, she then collaborated with Bertrand Delanoë and Anne Hidalgo between 2008 and 2013 as Director General of Urban Planning at the Paris City Hall. Never inserted in the Socialist Party as indicated Release In a portrait produced in 2018, Elisabeth Borne returned to government responsibilities in 2014 by taking over the cabinet of Ségolène Royale, then Minister of Ecology.
Not really known for curling up with her collaborators, the former socialist presidential candidate was quickly impressed, like everyone else, by the tenacity and hard work of the new head of government action. : “An extraordinary, amazing, human girl, an incredible workhorse”, said Anne Hidalgo, another conquered boss, during the time of the town hall of Paris. If before 2015, Elisabeth Borne entrusted Release take the time to read Chalandon’s novels and go to the theater with her friends, three years later she joked in the same newspaper about her hobbies: “Free time? An interesting concept”.
“An incredible workhorse”
This “tireless worker”, according to an intimate quoted by Le Monde, shares with his new n + 1 a certain propensity to send messages in the middle of the night as if it were the end of the lunch break. Habits that have not only earned him compliments, especially with this surname born to inspire nicknames full of cowery. The best ? Elisabeth “Born-out” when she was in charge of the RATP, Elisabeth “Bornée”, when she started to chain some of the hottest files of Macron’s first five-year term. Among them, the opening to competition of the SNCF and the reform of unemployment insurance do not exactly make her pass for a Guevarist to the left, despite a passage to the Ecological Transition crowned by the vote of the mobility law in favor of more sustainable means of transport.
“Her appointment begins from the first moments with an attempt at deception, Ms. Borne would be a leftist woman, but we do not grant her this label”, thundered Jean-Luc Mélenchon, evoking one “of the harshest figures of abuse social”. For her part, Sandrine Rousseau ridiculed a minister responsible for “non-compliance with the citizens’ convention on the climate and the maintenance of the tax advantage on palm oil”.
His supporters prefer to highlight his sense of dialogue to bring recalcitrant companies to heel on the issue of teleworking during the acute phase of the pandemic and the long phases of consultations open to the unions, which made her the minister “of impossible reforms that have become possible”, punchline signed Christophe Castaner .
Emblematic and criticized reforms
An enviable reputation within the majority which will quickly be put to the test by the “mother of all battles”, the famous pension reform wanted by Emmanuelle Macron and postponed several times in recent years. This will undoubtedly require this divorced woman, mother of a child, to wet her jersey in the media to make this portrait of a somewhat rigid and not always pedagogical “techno” machine lie when convincing the skeptics of macronism of well-being. basis of his action.
Moreover, it had not escaped the interested party herself that rubbing shoulders with universal suffrage would not harm her legitimacy this spring: before being called by the President of the Republic to replace Jean Castex, she had declared his candidacy for the post of deputy for the 6th constituency of Calvados. An affordable challengebut a challenge that suddenly takes on another dimension.