Ségolène Royal gets key role in French cabinet reshuffle

Ségolène Royal gets key role in French cabinet reshuffle

François Hollande's former partner returns to national stage as environment minister in president's 'government of combat'

Kim Willsher in Paris

theguardian.com, Wednesday 2 April 2014 / http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/apr/02/segolene-royal-french-cabinet-reshuffle

Ségolène Royal, the French president's former partner, has been given a key cabinet position in a dramatic government reshuffle.

Royal, 60, was appointed environment, sustainable development and energy minister in François Hollande's new "government of combat", a shakeup regarded as the president's last chance to fulfil his election pledges and salvage his reputation.

It is a long-awaited comeback for Royal, an experienced politician and former Socialist party (PS) presidential candidate and came exactly 22 years after she took up her first ministerial job on 2 April 1992.

She had been angling for a government post since Hollande was elected in 2012, despite having witheringly said of her former partner before he came to power: "Can the French people name a single thing he has achieved in 30 years in politics?"

However, Royal's enforced exile was due more to personal than political reasons. The president, who does not like conflict, felt unable to appoint her for fear of upsetting his former partner Valérie Trierweiler, for whom he left Royal, the mother of his four children.

It was only Hollande's split from Trierweiler in January, after it was revealed he was having an affair with a French actor, that opened the door for a rapprochement and Royal's return to the national stage.

Hollande's promised leaner and meaner administration, as he described it, contained further surprises when new ministers were named on Wednesday.

The president has been forced on to the back foot after unprecedented losses in Sunday's local elections and a wave of popular support for the far-right Front National led by Marine Le Pen.

After the electoral rout, Jean-Marc Ayrault resigned as prime minister before he was pushed out. His replacement, Manuel Valls, announced a slimmed down administration of 16 ministers compared with 38 in the previous administration. However, a number of junior ministers, known in France as secretaries of state, will be also be appointed.

There were equal numbers of men and women in the cabinet. The most high profile, Najat Vallaud-Belkacem, lost her job as government spokesperson, but remains minister for women's rights.

While Hollande's appointment of the no-nonsense Valls, 51, who is on the right of the PS and has been likened to Tony Blair, seemed logical in the light of the election debacle and after the president's public declaration in January that he was now a "social democrat", the PM's subsequent appointment of Arnauld Montebourg, a former rival on the left of the party, as economy minister with special responsibility for industry, was unexpected.

Montebourg's top-level post will assuage Socialist diehards dismayed at Valls's elevation, but risks putting France on a collision course with Europe. The new economy minister is an protectionist who scorns globalisation and who has described EU rules restricting state subsidies for struggling industries as "obsolete and fundamentalist".

Montebourg, known as "Monsieur Made in France" because of his calls for the French to engage in economic patriotism and buy French, has also compared the economic policies of the German chancellor, Angela Merkel, to those of Bismarck, the 19th-century Prussian statesman.

The government shakeup also saw the departure of the finance minister, Pierre Moscovici, a close friend of the disgraced former presidential hopeful and former head of the International Monetary Fund, Dominique Strauss Kahn. Moscovici caused a stir last September when he said the French were fed up with increasing tax bills, while Hollande was exhorting people to make an exceptional effort to drag the country out of the economic mire.

On the international stage, nothing has changed: the foreign minister, Laurent Fabius, and defence minister, Jean-Yves Le Drian, kept their jobs.

Royal has held four ministerial jobs, including environment, in previous Socialist administrations under François Mitterrand (who passed over her then partner Hollande).

Having lost a bid to become president in 2007, when she was defeated by Nicolas Sarkozy, Royal might have been expected to hang up her political boots. Instead she came back fighting. She, along with Valls and Montebourg, stood against Hollande in the PS primary elections to choose a presidential candidate. Royal received little support from the party's rank and file, but refused to give up hope of making a comeback.

One of her close friends told Le Monde that when Hollande and Trierweiler split, "the lights turned green for Ségolène's return". Relations between the two women, already strained, had stretched to breaking point when Trierweiler tweeted her support for Royal's rival in the legislative elections of June 2012, just a month after Hollande became president. Royal failed to gain the seat.

Afterwards, Royal said: "You know in life when one is betrayed, when someone hurts you, gratuitously to boot, when it's fierce, when it's violent, if one wants to survive it, you have to forgive.

"Those who remain resentful, who are eaten up with internal resentment, you can see it in their face, in their behaviour. I have never let myself be eaten up by resentment or vindictiveness. But forgiving is one thing, forgetting is another."

After being appointed on Wednesday, Royal said she was "very honoured to be given with such a difficult and passionate mission". Earlier, she toldBFMTV she had no "sense of revenge".

However, her appointment, will provoke mixed reactions among colleagues and the PS and is a risk coming at a time when Hollande is running out of options and can ill-afford divisions in his administration.

Among those who dislike her is Moscovici, who once said: "There are people who detest Ségolène Royal even in the Socialist party."

Others disagree. Last year, the French satirical magazine Marianne wrote: "Royal is useful. Very useful. Even if many find her just as 'unbearable' as always. Firstly because the criticisms she voices against the left in power are absolutely fair … she knows how to point the finger at the failings of the government and the head of state."