This year, even more than others, the holidays of ministers are at high political risk. We must both let the French breathe while showing themselves at work, a few weeks before the flammable pension reform.
Simplicity and proximity. Between explosion of inflation, strike at the SNCF and risk of power cuts, ministers are keeping a low profile for the Christmas holidays.
“It is always a complicated period for us to manage. We must show that we are letting the French people breathe, who really need it while remaining in charge”, summarizes a ministerial adviser to BFMTV.com.
Rest before an explosive comeback
If no instructions have been officially given to the ministers – apart from the communication of an address and a telephone number which allows them to be contacted at all times, including in white areas – the government is playing the card of sobriety.
It is that the start of the school year is likely to shake up. On the menu for the next few weeks, several hot topics are on the table, raising fears of a coagulation of discontent between the 15% rise in electricity and gas prices, the end of the rebate at the pump and the extension of the retirement age.
What push the ministers to breathe before a potentially explosive return to Paris. Most of them thus spend their holidays with their families, like Agnès Pannier-Runacher.
“With his phone”
Those on the grill in January also let it be known that they remain focused on their mission.
“The Minister will be in the Alps with his phone to prepare for the busy parliamentary return”, thus assures the entourage of Frank Riester, the Minister Delegate in charge of Relations with Parliament.
On his menu: managing to convince the LRs to say yes to the pension reform presented on January 15 or even smoothing things over with them as the future immigration bill approaches.
Blanquer’s trauma in Ibiza
Implicitly, many in the government have kept a very bad memory of the case of Jean-Michel Blanquer last year.
Then Minister of National Education, he flew to Ibiza while working on the new health protocol in schools, finally unveiled the day before the start of the school year in an interview given from his Mediterranean retirement. What aroused a lively controversy which had annoyed Emmanuel Macron at the time.
“We expect ministers to be self-sacrificing and simple. We must at all costs avoid anything that is ostentatious,” deciphers Gaspard Gantzer, former communications adviser to François Hollande.
Borne controversy in Marrakech in 2019
Elisabeth Borne herself found herself in the eye of the storm in 2019. In the midst of the SNCF strike against the pension reform at the time, The Parisian reveals that the one who is then Minister of Ecological Transition, spends her holidays in Marrakech (Morocco).
If these holidays are noticed, it is because the future Prime Minister is then in charge of discussions with the railway unions and Emmanuel Macron has called on his ministers to mobilize on the ground during the holidays.
Faced with the controversy, all the stronger since thousands of French people were struggling to join their families for Christmas by train, his cabinet tried to put out the fire. The case left no trace but had everything of a warning message still relevant three years later, in the midst of the rail strike.
