The new French Prime Minister, Élisabeth Borne, is the incarnation of the republican meritocracy, of a State that has an almost inexhaustible pool of technocrats capable of occupying almost any high administrative and political function. To start his second presidential term, Emmanuel Macron, has chosen a very serious and demanding woman, with extensive government experience and at the head of public companies.
The French system is so peculiar that it allows a person like Borne who has never run for election to become head of government. He will appear for the first time in the legislative elections on June 12 and 19. She will do it in the department of Calvados (Normandy), where she is originally from. She, in fact, has no legal obligation to be a deputy. The decision to opt for a seat this time was made by her before knowing that she would be prime minister.
Borne's long career includes positions of responsibility in teams of socialist leaders such as former Prime Minister Lionel Jospin and former ministers Ségolène Royal and Jack Lang. This closeness to social democracy makes Borne an ideal figure in principle for a second Macron term that could mean a slight shift to the left, at least in rhetorical terms.
A civil engineer by training, the new tenant of the Matignon palace was for a time director of strategy for the national railway company (SNCF), the equivalent of Renfe. After being Minister of Transport, she had to carry out a very unpopular reform of this company, a state monster in which the unions had obtained privileged but unsustainable conditions in a regime of free international competition. The railway workers rebelled and staged a strike for several months, but with hardly any concessions. Borne was also in charge of the Parisian public transport company (RATP), another very complicated entity to manage.
Tireless worker, rigorous, dominating the issues under her responsibility, Borne is a black beast of the unions, both for the SNCF reform and for the pension reform, which was aborted due to covid but must be reactivated very soon because it is one of Macron's obsessions, one of the transforming elements that he wants to leave as a legacy. Borne's collaborators in the three ministries she had held until now (Transport, Labor and Ecological Transition) gave her the nickname Borne-out (burned), due to her level of demand, towards herself and towards others. "She works like crazy, she is brutal, the prefects hate her," a person in charge of Macron's party confided to Libération.
During the pandemic, Borne had to take a forced break when he contracted the virus. She went in March 2021. She had to be hospitalized for breathing difficulties and liver problems.
Divorced and with a son, Borne has not had it easy in her personal life. She still carries the trauma of her father's suicide when she was only 11 years old. Joseph Bornstein, a refugee of Polish Jewish origin, fought in the resistance against the Nazis and survived Auschwitz and Buchenwald. Her father and his brother were victims of the Shoah. After World War II, Bornstein married, in Normandy, the daughter of a family of pharmacists. She later changed her last name. She was renamed Borne, her nom de guerre during the resistance. The suicide occurred as a result of the economic problems of the pharmaceutical laboratory that she had founded. The traumas of war could also play a role.
Borne and his sister got ahead with effort in their studies. From that self-discipline she has left a style that can sometimes seem somewhat martial, reinforced by her deep voice of an ex-smoker, nothing to do with his predecessor, Jean Castex, a folksy and warm prime minister who speaks singing French from the south. Le Figaro has written that, with Borne, France is experiencing “a Scandinavian moment”. They say that she, in fact, likes the novels of the Finnish author Arto Paasilinna. Although, to recharge her batteries, she prefers to escape to the deserts, either to Jordan or to the south of Morocco.
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