Simplicity and proximity. Between the explosion of inflation, the strike at the SNCF and the risk of power cuts, the ministers are keeping a low profile for the Christmas holidays.
“It is always a difficult period for us to manage. We must show that we are letting the French people breathe, who really need it, while we remain in office,” summarizes a ministerial adviser to BFMTV.com.
Rest before an explosive comeback
If official instructions have not been given to the ministers -beyond the communication of an address and a telephone number that allow them to be in contact with them at all times, even in the white areas-, the Government plays the card of sobriety .
It is that the beginning of the school year is likely to be shaken. On the menu for the coming weeks, several hot topics are on the table, which raises fears of a coagulation of discontent between the 15% rise in electricity and gas prices, the end of the discount at the pump and the extension of the retirement age. .
What pushes the ministers to breathe before a potentially explosive return to Paris. Most of them spend their holidays with their families, like Agnès Pannier-Runacher.
“With his phone”
Those on the grid 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, Minister Delegate in charge of Relations with Parliament.
On his menu: manage to convince the LR to say yes to the pension reform presented on January 15 or even smooth things over as the future immigration law approaches.
Blanquer’s trauma in Ibiza
Implicitly, many in the government have had a very bad memory of the Jean-Michel Blanquer case last year.
Then Minister of National Education, he flew to Ibiza while working on the new sanitary protocol in schools, finally revealed on the eve of the start of the school year in an interview given from his Mediterranean retreat. What sparked a lively controversy that at the time bothered Emmanuel Macron.
“We expect ministers to be self-sacrificing and simple. We must avoid anything ostentatious at all costs,” deciphers Gaspard Gantzer, former communication adviser to François Hollande.
Controversy carried out 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 pension reform at the time, the parisian reveals that the one who is then Minister of Ecological Transition, spends her vacations 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 asked his ministers to mobilize on the ground during the holidays.
Faced with controversy, all the more so as thousands of French people were struggling to reunite with their families by train at Christmas, his cabinet tried to put out the fire. The case left no trace but it had a whole warning message still valid three years later, in the midst of the railway strike.
Source: BFM TV
