The Cabinet announced on Wednesday by the government of France’s newly elected President, Emmanuel Macron, is made up of a carefully chosen cast of characters meant to signal how he plans to govern. It has some appointments from the left and some from the right; it is evenly divided between career politicians and those who come from the private sector or nonprofits. And it has equal numbers of men and women.
But Legislative Elections are scheduled for June 11 and 18, and if Mr. Macron’s En Marche! party receives anything less than a decisive majority, he could be forced to make individual changes or even completely reshuffle his Cabinet to better reflect the make-up of the National Assembly. In the meantime, while he will be able to plan legislation and lay out his agenda with his new team, it is unlikely that any major legislation will be turned into law because Parliament will not be in session until after the elections.
As France’s Economy Minister, Mr. Macron, a former investment banker, had pointed the school to a European Union grant to open a pilot program to train at-risk youths. Mr. Macron has made clear that he supports a variety of stimulus measures that help businesses, wants to make the payroll tax credit permanent and would push labour reforms even further.
He has endorsed a 50 billion Euro (about $55 billion) stimulus plan to reduce unemployment – which includes investing in training programs for one million youths and offering bonuses to businesses that hire from the impoverished suburbs – as well as a host of other proposals that focus more on innovation and modernizing infrastructure. All of these, it is hoped, will reduce the radicalization of the youth who are second or third generation immigrants who make up a lot of the unemployed but have problems finding work and acclimatizing in France’s socio-economic landscape.
By the afternoon of his first full day in office, Macron was in Berlin, receiving a warm welcome from Chancellor Angela Merkel. Playing to his audience, Macron told Merkel that he understands his primary task is to fix France by implementing economic reform. Only an economically stronger France, in the German view, can be a close to equal partner for Berlin.
In Berlin, Macron said France was “the only country that has been unable to tackle mass unemployment in the last 20 years,” and promised to fix it. He talked about fiscal and economic cooperation, external defense, joint asylum proposals and foreign policy as possible areas of cooperation between France and Germany, thus re-affirming his desire to strengthen the macro-economy.
Whatever Mr Macron wants to — he doesn’t have much time for it. He has to implement supply side policies to reduce the costs of hiring and firing workers, mostly to the need for employers to pay social security taxes. If he can tackle the major problem of unemployment, he will have a free reign to deal with Brexit UK and the lingering problems in the Eurozone. For now, he has to focus on changing France’s macro-economic problems. That will be possible only if he wins the Legislative Elections. If he is forced to govern with a coalition, or worse, Le Pen gains even thirty seats in the National Assembly, it will spell trouble ahead. For now, the rest of Europe can wait.
