00:00But now to discuss this changing of the guard, I can bring in Andrew Smith, lecturer in Liberal Arts at Queen Mary University of London.
00:07Good afternoon, Andrew, and thank you for joining us.
00:10A changing of the guard today at the Hôtel de Matignon, but is there actually going to be a change?
00:18Well, that's exactly it, isn't it? It's one of Emmanuel Macron's most loyal soldiers coming forth, about to emerge in the Matignon.
00:25And I think that's really important. This is, in a way, another roll of the dice for Macron.
00:30This is surprising in its unsurprisingness. He has reverted to type.
00:36This is very much a continuity of the strategy that we've already seen.
00:41He's trying to manage the soft right, the centre-right.
00:44You've got someone tied to the Republicans who's friendly with Bruno Retailleau and others who maybe want to retain his position as interior minister.
00:52He's not alienated to the centre-left because we've got people with whom he can work there in the centre-left.
00:58But we also know that he's courted in the past the far-right discussions very publicly with Marine Le Pen.
01:03So this is very much an attempt to negotiate consensus.
01:07And really what it amounts to is seeing the National Assembly as a sort of, I guess, a broken machine for passing budgets rather than a place to make change.
01:16And that, I think, is quite a consistent message that we're seeing from Emmanuel Macron at the moment.
01:20Now, Sébastien Le Corneau is seen as close to Emmanuel Macron and has held ministerial or junior portfolios in all of Macron's governments to date.
01:30With regard to the personal relationship, is this an attempt by the president to reassert control over the actual government?
01:40I think very much so.
01:43This is Emmanuel Macron leaning back into what he knows, the people that he trusts.
01:46This is him working with someone who's seen as really an ultra-loyalist.
01:50Le Corneau is somebody that's kind of shaped in Macron's image.
01:54A young figure, seen as a great interpersonal communicator.
01:57Someone he trusts.
01:58The face of France's rearmament, committed to ideas of French sovereignty.
02:02Sorry, Andrew.
02:02I'll just have to cut you off for a moment as Sébastien Le Corneau and François Bayrou are emerging now from the Hôtel de Matignon.
02:10We will come back to you.
02:12Let's listen in.
02:13Today, I welcome Sébastien Le Corneau in his new job as prime minister.
02:33I welcome him to the government.
02:36And at this time, there are three words that come to mind, beyond the words of thanks, of course, that I would address to the fabulous team that worked with me.
02:51I think we've worked together very well.
02:55And I know that there are several very important projects that are ready to go, and you will be reviewing them.
03:01The first word that comes to mind is help, the verb, to help.
03:11I will, and I'm sure that all of my team will, do everything that we can to help the new government, because we have some experience in the matter.
03:26It's not an easy thing to do, and there's a lot at stake, there are many challenges, and it's an important time for France.
03:37There are a lot of demands placed on us, and it's a critical, even dangerous period.
03:45And so, my help and the help of my team is something you can count on, and this throughout the weeks and months to come.
03:53And so, the second verb, I would mention, is unite, we must come together.
04:06Our country must not remain in division and insults and violence, everything that we've seen recently,
04:13which is, in fact, a severe handicap for our future.
04:18And the third verb is to invent.
04:26I don't think we will remain divided, and I do not believe that we will remain a country where elected officials and political parties
04:37will continue to deny the reality of things, continue to pretend that, no, we don't want to see difficult things.
04:49I think that, on the contrary, we must look these things in the face, and we must invent the new world that we must bring about.
05:01And we must invent this world based on the reality of our situation.
05:07And I think many, many French people want to participate in rebuilding a realistic nation.
05:14And I believe deeply in political idealism.
05:21I don't think you can have a political commitment without ideals.
05:26Jaurès has said it better than I did.
05:28We must move towards the ideal, and we must begin with the real.
05:37And I think for a long time, this idea has been somewhat shadowed.
05:47And it's time now for the French to take up this idea again.
05:52And this is a time of possibility for us.
05:58Things are opening up.
06:00So we must help one another.
06:02We must unite, and we must invent.
06:05And we will be happy to do that, Mr. Prime Minister, with you and your team.
06:09Thank you very much, Mr. Prime Minister.
06:22Mr. Prime Minister, ladies and gentlemen, ministers, I will not make a big speech because we can see that the current instability and crisis that we are going through calls for humility and solemnity.
06:50I would like to thank the President of the Republic for his confidence in me.
06:56And I would like to thank you as well for the help that you are offering me, which, of course, I will gladly accept.
07:03I would like to pay homage to your great courage as an activist and a citizen as you continue to defend your ideals right up until the last minute.
07:16And I think that if there is justice, one day you will be recognized for all that you have done for France.
07:25And then I would like to say to the French people that we will succeed.
07:32Nothing is impossible as we move forward.
07:34We are faced with a gap between the political situation and what citizens legitimately expect for their social and economic situation and what they expect from us.
07:51And there is a gap between real life and political life.
07:54It is quite a concern, not only for those of us who are sitting in governing positions, but for all of those interested in politics.
08:06And, of course, as I am leaving the position as Minister of the Army, I have seen that there are also gaps that exist between the reality of things and how things are perceived.
08:17And we can't allow that to persist.
08:22We perhaps need to be more creative, but also more technical in the way that we work.
08:28We've just spoken about this at length.
08:33But I think there will also be some disruption.
08:35And not only in terms of form and method, but there will be deep disruptions.
08:42So, I will not make a long speech, but I will be meeting with political leaders in the coming days, with the trade union leaders.
08:52And I will soon be making a longer speech to the French people.
08:55Mr. Prime Minister, once again, dear François, thank you.
09:00And we can go back to the hotel.
09:30François de Matignon there, where France 24's Clovis Cavalli has just been watching that handover of power between François Bayrou and Sébastien Le Corneux.
09:45Clovis, two short speeches, but quite a contrast between the two men there.
09:52Indeed, and the two men, and now François Bayrou and his team leaving the Hotel de Matignon.
10:01François Bayrou, the former now Prime Minister of France, saying to Sébastien Le Corneux, who's taking over,
10:09you can count on me, and also saying that he doesn't believe that divisions, instability, and so on, and chaos will continue here in France.
10:19There is a path to fix that.
10:22And François Bayrou also saying we need to invent a new world to fix the problems here in France, and millions of people want to take part in that.
10:35I am convinced in that.
10:36Those were the words of François Bayrou.
10:38And then interesting to hear Sébastien Le Corneux, who's now the new Prime Minister of France, saying we will succeed.
10:46There is no impossible way.
10:49And at the same time, there is a very big gap between the political situation, by that he meant all the divisions, the chaos,
10:57the failure to negotiate between parties, and what the French people expect.
11:02And that gap he needs to fill.
11:05He needs to fix it.
11:06Thank you very much for that, Clovis.
11:08We'll go back to Andrew Smith, lecturer in Liberal Arts at Queen Mary University of London.
11:14Thank you once again, Andrew.
11:17We have just heard there from the new Prime Minister, Sébastien Le Corneux.
11:22He mentioned a need to be more creative and more technical.
11:27There was a little bit of the air of a middle manager about that.
11:32What's his political narrative so far?
11:34He's one of the guys that helped find that solution, if it were, that attempt to address the frustrations of the Yellow Vest movement through a local implantation, that idea of engaging in a very local level.
11:49He's also the face of France's rearmament, finding answers to technical problems around rearmament.
11:54And already there today, we've seen him signal a willingness to meet with social partners in the unions.
12:00And we've seen a willingness to kind of, you know, exercise that interpersonal skills of working across party lines.
12:05And I think more than anything, this doesn't represent a change in ideas or ideology or anything like that.
12:11This is, you know, a change in strategy, looking at ideas of how to work with this difficult reality.
12:18Anything is possible, he says.
12:20If politics is the art of the possible, then this is really someone who's coming in to kind of work between those gaps, to find the idea of how to make this happen.
12:28Now, of course, we're seeing quite large protests across France today.
12:35And there are a number of grievances the protesters have.
12:39But one of them is the Emmanuel Macron's budget, which is still hanging in the balance.
12:45The opposition and unions are firmly against that.
12:48And the protests have started.
12:51They don't look like they're going to finish right away.
12:54Will the new prime minister be able to do anything different to what François Bayroux has done?
13:01I think it's going to be very difficult to find a huge amount of difference.
13:06But clearly, there needs to be some change in approach.
13:09François Bayroux was unwilling to engage with some of the kind of, I guess you'd start to say, kind of intermediaries, perhaps, in the Socialist Party with whom he'd engaged.
13:20You know, he said he couldn't move on certain things.
13:21He wouldn't move on other things.
13:23We saw him give ground, famously, to, you know, to thinking about what the far right might want to look at, but then pulled right back again.
13:32François Bayroux had seemed to disappoint many people with whom he set up potential partnerships.
13:37And I think what will need to happen is there will need to be some movement around some of the big stocking horses.
13:42It might be public holidays.
13:43It might be looking again at kind of, you know, more progressive taxation measures.
13:48These are the kind of things that might speak to some of these citizen demands.
13:51Of course, there's been big movements across France, perhaps not huge movements in the scale of the Yellow Vests.
13:58Perhaps we tie that to the greater control of the far left over some of these movements as they've developed.
14:04But clearly, there is, you know, a lot of the same slogans, a lot of the same personnel that were involved in the Yellow Vests.
14:10The chant is, you know, on a la, we are here.
14:12And that's what people want to be heard.
14:14That's got to be the message for what Le Corneau has to do.
14:18It's what he's got to bring into that from the first moment.
14:21Recognise there's a difference to where they are, the protesters, and where government is in this current impasse.
14:27At the moment, for me, I see greater blockages in the National Assembly than on the streets of Paris today.
14:33And I think actually Le Corneau in the past has found solutions to difficult issues.
14:37And we can only hope, for France's sake, that he's able to find more solutions in this current term.
14:43Now, more than 12 months have elapsed since Emmanuel Macron last dissolved the National Assembly,
14:48meaning he can theoretically do it again if he so chooses.
14:52And former President Nicolas Sarkozy has urged him to do that.
14:55But is there any chance of this happening, even if Sébastien Le Corneau fails in his new job?
15:03It's really challenging to see.
15:05I mean, of course, we saw Sarkozy talk about a dissolution.
15:08We saw Edouard Philippe say that, you know, people might be betting on it.
15:11And as soon last night as this announcement broke, there was another Macron loyalist coming in as prime minister.
15:17I saw people saying online, you know, other commentators saying, let's bet on dissolution, surely.
15:22It looks difficult.
15:24This is a really challenging situation.
15:25Nothing fundamentally has changed.
15:28If anything, I think some of those potential partners are more entrenched in their viewpoints.
15:32It is a really challenging situation for Le Corneau to address.
15:37So there is this potential solution coming from above.
15:39But we know that looking at the national rally and the polls, et cetera, all this will do is give more of an impetus to that popular anger,
15:49to an emotional kind of expression of social pessimism effectively coming from the people.
15:54And that is, you know, not a positive sign if you want to create a constructive France that can move forwards.
16:00I think again and again, Emmanuel Macron said this is a parliamentary crisis, not a political crisis.
16:06And again, it relies on parliament to solve the problems of the French people and not the people to solve the problems of the French parliament.
16:13And so I think this is this appointment is very much something which recognizes that.
16:16But that's not going to be something that people are pleased to hear, because for many, it looks like continuity macronism.
16:22Now, Emmanuel Macron has faced deadlocked parliaments for much of his second term, particularly since he called the snap parliamentary elections last year.
16:32Does this make him a lame duck president?
16:35I think it has represents a real change of priorities for Emmanuel Macron, of course, in his second term, he has been that much more active, I would say, on the international stage.
16:47He's been working on the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
16:50He's been engaging with international partners around the war in Gaza, the Israeli actions in Gaza.
16:55He's been looking at, you know, trying to mitigate Europe's reaction with an engagement with the U.S.
17:03This has been, I think, the kind of priority of his second term.
17:06He's left much of that domestic governance to prime ministers who, as we've seen, have repeatedly failed to do much with that brief.
17:15So whether this represents Macron putting a loyalist back in charge so he can take a more hands on role in domestic affairs, I guess we'll see.
17:24At the moment, he has been unable to influence and impose his will on parliament.
17:29He's been unable to drive much change forward.
17:32Why? Because other parties, the opposition, are unwilling to work with him.
17:35So in that sense, he has been unable to exercise his authority as president on a domestic stage.
17:41Whether this changes with the appointment of the new prime minister, it remains to be seen.
17:45Perhaps this will be the electroshock that François Bayrou spoke about as a way to revive Emmanuel Macron's second term.
17:52As you say, mired in crisis up to this stage.
17:55Thank you very much for that.
17:57Andrew Smith, lecturer in liberal arts at Queen Mary University.
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