French President Emmanuel Macron reshuffled his government on Thursday as he looks to move on from a series of crises since his re-election last year, government sources said.
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After weeks of speculation that he might change prime minister, the 45-year-old head of state said on Monday that he was sticking with under-fire Elisabeth Borne.
Since his re-election last May, Macron has faced months of fierce street protests over a deeply unpopular pensions reform and was forced into crisis management again late last month when riots erupted nationwide.
Advisors and ministers had long argued over whether the centrist should carry out a major overhaul of the cabinet to signal a fresh start, but in the end the changes were limited.
The highest-profile change saw the replacement of Pap Ndiaye, France’s first black education minister, who despite a solid intellectual profile was seen as lacking political experience and found little support among Macron’s allies.
His successor is Gabriel Attal, 34, a former government spokesman and currently public accounts minister, and rising star in the Macron administration, the sources told AFP.
Junior interior minister Marlene Schiappa was also sacked after she became embroiled in a scandal over the management of a public fund to fight Islamic extremism which she announced in 2021.
The feminist campaigner also irked her colleagues by posing for Playboy magazine in the middle of the protests over Macron’s pension reform, which raised the retirement age to 64 from 62.
France got a new health minister, Aurelien Rousseau, who was previously chief of staff to Prime Minister Borne.
Macron’s popularity ratings remain low but have begun to recover after suffering a near-record slump in April, with 31 percent of respondents in a July 5 poll saying they had a positive view of him.
Riots sparked by the police killing of a teenager in a Paris suburb on June 27 saw four nights of intense clashes, with around 3,700 people arrested and hundreds of public buildings attacked.
The violence, the worst since 2005, was contained after the deployment of around 45,000 security forces, including elite police special forces and armoured vehicles.
(AFP)
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