Aurélien Fleurot, edited by Yanis Darras
modified to
9:20 p.m., May 16, 2022
Appointed by Édouard Philippe in 2017, then at the head of three ministries, Élisabeth Borne now becomes Prime Minister of Emmanuel Macron’s second five-year term. A known face who has led major reforms, sometimes unpopular. The former Minister of Transport first led my first major reform of Emmanuel Macron’s first five-year term: railway reform. A reform which was in particular to prepare the SNCF for competition, with the very symbolic end of the hiring of railway workers with the statutes.
The railway workers, headwind against the reform, had gone on strike for several weeks, severely disrupting traffic. The union representatives, received by the Minister in the spring of 2018, remember very complicated negotiations.
“Real difficulties in negotiations”
“I really remember the difficult, tense, structured meetings. The Minister of Transport at the time was, in my opinion, no stranger to this situation because I refrain from the rigidity of the meetings, the real difficulties of negotiations”, recalls Roger Dillenseger, former secretary general of Unsa railway.
Other railway unions, hearing the news, were less restrained and spoke of “very bad news” for social dialogue, describing her as very confident. “She is tough in business, but knows her files very well and you will have to be convincing”, explains to Europe 1 Yves Veyrier, the secretary of Force Ouvrière, who met Elisabeth Borne at the Ministry of Labor on the occasion of the reform of unemployment insurance.
“An ideal profile”
For a former adviser to the Ministry of Ecological Transition, Marine Braud, now at Terra Nova, a laboratory of ideas anchored on the left, the Prime Minister knew how to evolve on the question of the environment: “For me, Élisabeth Borne made a where she understood the environmental issues. So typically, for someone who has to think about ecological planning and the way we are going to have to change our production methods and our consumption methods in the years to come. For me, it is an ideal profile”, she underlines.
Uncompromising, inflexible, attentive to the qualities that will soon be put to the test from now on at Matignon.