According to certain political commentators, the choice of Élisabeth Borne as the new prime minister of France is yet further proof of Emmanuel Macron’s political genius. They claim the decision to appoint her will undermine the newly-formed left-wing alliance which is contesting the forthcoming Parliamentary elections in June. For they depict the new premier, who worked in the offices of three socialist ministers – prime minister Lionel Jospin, education minister Jack Lang and environment minister Ségolène Royal – as very much a “woman of the Left”.

“We are currently seeing the combination of large measures of boldness and continuity which show that the president of the Republic is anxious to stay ahead of the game,” enthused Le Monde. “The enshrinement of a ’technocrat’ from the Left,” was the headline in Le Figaro. Meanwhile political commentator Christophe Barbier said that by picking Élisabeth Borne the head of state had averted the “small risk that NUPES [editor’s note, for Nouvelle Union Populaire Écologique et Sociale, the leftwing alliance in the Parliamentary elections] might work”.

Political journalist Nathalie Saint-Cricq meanwhile suggested that the Parliamentary elections this June would allow the new prime minister to “show a different side, otherwise people won’t know that she’s of the Left!” Indeed, Borne’s supposedly left-leaning approach to politics has not really leapt out at one during her last five years as a government minister. As evidence of this one can point to the way the former labour minister defended the plan to put back the official retirement age to 65, and oversaw the reform of the unemployment benefit system.

This last reform was an “unfair” one in which “100%” of users lose out in changes that were implemented solely to “make savings at the expense of the unemployed”, according to the secretary general of the leading CFDT trade union Laurent Berger, someone who can himself hardly be described as a die-hard figure of the Left. And as transport minister at the start of Macron’s first presidency, Élisabeth Borne also oversaw the dismantling of the rail operator SNCF and the liberalisation of the railways.

Back in 2015, when the government led by prime minister Manuel Valls under President François Hollande decided to oppose the renationalisation of the country’s motorways, Borne was chief of staff to environment minister Ségolène Royal. At the time, and in partnership with Alexis Kohler, who is now Macron’s chief of staff at the Élysée but who was then his chief of staff at the Ministry of the Economy, she drew up made-to-measure contracts for the companies who held the motorway concessions.

 Awkward attempts to woo the Left between election rounds

She represents, then, a particular idea of the Left, of public services and of the general interest. Yet despite this very clear evidence in her CV, those in the Macron camp who still describe themselves as ’social democrats’ have applauded the appointment of a woman who comes from the Territoires de Progrès (TDP) party, the self-proclaimed ’left wing’ of the current Parliamentary majority. In truth, there is no real incongruity here. After all, former premier Manuel Valls, who has himself joined TDP, still keeps a straight face when claiming he is of the Left.

The portrait that is being painted by Emmanuel Macron’s supporters, and trumpeted by some zealous commentators, supposedly supports the idea that the president understood the message from left-wing voters in the second round of the presidential election. These voters cast their vote for Macron not out of support for him but instead to keep out the far-right’s Marine Le Pen. “I am aware that this vote places me under an obligation in the years to come,” he said on the night of his re-election.

During the election campaign itself Emmanuel Macron had made awkward attempts to woo these left-leaning voters by plagiarising an old slogan from the La Ligue Communiste Révolutionnaire (LCR) - “Our lives and their lives are worth more than all profits” - and by recycling a manifesto line from the radical-left La France Insoumise (LFI), “A Common Future”. The president also promised that he would appoint a prime minister “directly in charge” of environmental policy because that was the “policy of all policies”.

 Emmanuel Macron has already forgotten who helped re-elect him

A non-negligible part of the 22% of votes cast for the LFI candidate Jean-Luc Mélenchon in the first round of the election went to Macron in the second round. This was not because they believed in his leftwing facade but because the ’Republican Front’ – an unofficial pact among mainstream parties and their followers to keep out the far-right – that the president himself said was dead in fact worked once again. The head of state could have kept this in mind a little longer when addressing his own supporters as he did on May 10^th.

On that day Emmanuel Macron spoke to the candidates standing for his party – formerly La République en Marche, now named Renaissance – at June’s elections. The president once again indulged in his favourite game, equating the far-right and their “exclusion plan” with the policies of the NUPES leftwing alliance, which he said involved choosing “sectarianism over universalism”. So it had taken just two short weeks for the president to forget who had helped re-elect him. And for him to scorn the Left once again.

Or rather to scorn that section of the Left that he has unilaterally chosen to eject from mainstream Republican politics simply because it is not part of the grand coalition that he controls. Within this new political configuration all that exists is the “extreme centre” where the head of state himself decides who is of the Right and who of the Left. According to this yardstick, anyone can become a figure of the Left, simply at the whim of the boss. Even Élisabeth Borne.

There is nothing too surprising about this political manipulation, following the experiences of the last five years. But they are no less irritating for that, given the way that Emmanuel Macron continues to fool everyone with the support of his cheerleaders. Those who today portray the new prime minister as a “woman of the Left” are the very same people who insisted a dozen times over that Macron’s first presidency would switch towards a more social, society-based approach.

Over and over again these commentators and supporters have spoken of the president “reinventing” himself, and treated with the utmost respect his many attempts at ’mea culpas’. They have done all they can to ensure people believe in him: to ensure that the communications strategy skilfully prepared at the Élysée like a Netflix series becomes political reality; and to ensure that all the old political reference points are blurred. All in aid of peddling the same one lie.

Ellen Salvi