Washington Post Macron’s ‘radical centrism’ sure looks a lot like conservatism By _James McAuley_ (https://www.washingtonpost.com/people/james-mcauley/) May 17, 2017 PARIS — Emmanuel Macron, France’s newly inaugurated president, announced his cabinet. Wednesday. The country’s youngest head of state in decades presented a list with a median age of 54 that ultimately ceded control of the nation’s economic affairs to right-wing politicians. Macron, 39, was elected on the highly unusual platform of muscular centrism — without the backing of either the center-left or center-right parties that have governed France since 1958. His list of cabinet ministers provided an early indication of what his lofty “neither-right-nor-left” platform would look like in practice. The answer: significantly conservative on the budget and the economy, as Macron — a former investment banker — appointed two well-known conservatives, Bruno Le Maire, 48, and Gérald Darmanin, 34, to lead the Economy and Budget ministries, respectively. These followed Macron’s appointment Monday of Édouard Philippe, 46, another member of the center-right Republican party, as his prime minister, France ’s official head of government. Although other prominent posts were assigned to Socialists — notably, France’s Interior and Foreign ministries — many of the leftists who grudgingly rallied behind Macron in the election were already disappointed. Jean-Christophe Cambadélis, the first secretary of France’s Socialist Party, wrote on Twitter after the announcement that ­Macron’s appointments represented a “new government but no government of renewal.” If there were certain “guarantees for the left,” he wrote, “Matignon and Bercy are on the right.” Matignon refers to the French prime minister’s headquarters; Bercy to the Paris seat of the economy minister. Macron’s intent to jump-start the French economy was a frequent campaign promise, and his proposals probably contributed to his appeal among the conservative voters who backed him against the far-right Marine Le Pen in the election’s final round. As the economy minister under President François Hollande, a Socialist, Macron was an outspoken advocate of market reforms devised to reboot a faltering economy with very little growth and an unemployment rate that has hovered around 10 percent for years.
Among other things, those reforms sought to expand France’s storied 35-hour workweek and to make it slightly easier for French companies to fire employees, who receive a significant number of labor protections. The proposed reforms sparked weeks of protests last year, but they became law in August 2016 after the government pushed them through Parliament. Despite Macron’s service in a Socialist cabinet, his support for these measures — along with his stint as an investment banker at Rothschild, where he made a reported $2.9 million — earned him a reputation as a neoliberal not fully committed to the leftist cause. This was a mainstay of the highly contentious election Macron ultimately won. Throughout the campaign, the far-left — whose leftist populism received an astonishing degree of support, especially among younger voters — railed against Macron. When Macron was elected, Mélenchon said that the “program of the new monarch-style president is known already” and constitutes “a war against the French social system.” But continuing market reforms will be key for Macron, especially regarding his pledge to double down on France’s ­commitments to the European Union. Speaking in Berlin this week alongside German Chancellor Angela Merkel, he promised to “” in his country, largely to regain Germany’s trust in France’s competence in managing its own domestic affairs. Tellingly, Macron changed the full title of the French Foreign Affairs Ministry to the Ministry for Europe and Foreign Affairs, suggesting the primacy of the European Union in his international agenda. In keeping with Macron’s promise to promote representative equality, half of the 18 ministers he named Monday are women. The new government’s first cabinet meeting is slated for Thursday morning. -- -- Centroids: The Center of the Radical Centrist Community <[email protected]> Google Group: http://groups.google.com/group/RadicalCentrism Radical Centrism website and blog: http://RadicalCentrism.org --- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Centroids: The Center of the Radical Centrist Community" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
