France: Elisabeth Borne is the face of pension reform – 03/21/2023 – World

Frontline in the turbulent conduct of Emmanuel Macron’s pension reform and threatened with deposition by a vote that did not obtain a majority by just nine votes, the Prime Minister of France, Elisabeth Borne, 61, needs to remain in office for another two months to overcome the mark of the first and only woman to hold the post of head of government before her.

Édith Cresson, appointed prime minister in 1991 by then-president François Mitterrand (1916-1996), was dismissed just ten months later amidst controversies involving homophobic and xenophobic statements and fights with the media that gave her an unavoidable crisis of popularity.

It was 31 years before another woman assumed that same prestigious place in the 5th Republic of France. It was on May 16, 2022, at the start of his second term, that Macron appointed Borne.

As a consequence of her discreet, disciplined and demanding profile, little was known about Borne’s private life when she took the tribune of the Assembly for her inauguration speech.

“If I’m here, I owe it to the Republic,” he said. “It was the Republic that reached out to me, making me a ward of the nation when I was the child whose father never fully returned from the fields. [de concentração nazistas]”, he revealed, to everyone’s surprise.

By then, Borne was a well-known figure in political life. She had previously been Minister of Transport, Ecological Transition and Labor during Macron’s first term. Earlier, in 2014, she was chief of staff for the socialist Ségolène Royale when she was at the head of the Ecology portfolio during the presidency of François Hollande.

And, in 2015, she was president of RAPT, the state-owned company that manages public transport in Greater Paris, building on the expertise acquired in the 2000s, when she was director of SNCF, the public giant that manages France’s rail network. Borne also has passages as advisor to the Ministry of Education and director of urban planning at the city of Paris, the city where she was born in 1961.

During her career in public service, she has stayed out of the spotlight, which she was thrown into by assuming the second most powerful position in the country.

That’s when it was discovered that his paternal family, of Russian origin Jews, had been decimated in Nazi concentration camps during World War II. His grandfather and two of his three uncles died at Auschwitz. Her father, Joseph, survived, but he never recovered from the ordeal – he never “fully came back”.

In a rare interview in which he dealt with his private life, granted to the Nouvel Observateur in December, Borne said that he grew up in a heavy environment, in which Christmas was not celebrated because his father had been arrested by the Nazis on December 25, in Grenoble, in the east of France. And that you couldn’t make noise in the house during the day because that was when her father, sleepwalking, got some rest.

When she was 11, her father committed suicide. With no financial conditions to raise her two daughters, her mother, Marie-Marguerite, handed over the guardianship of her daughters to the State. And Borne became a “pupil of the nation”, a status reserved for children under 21 years of age of people killed or injured as a result of wars or terrorist attacks.

To escape the pain of loss, the current prime minister sought refuge in mathematics. “I dove into it like therapy.”

Borne became a stubborn student, who did not accept not taking the new maxim. At age 16, she moved in with her then-boyfriend, Olivier, whom she later married and had their only child, Nathan. With him she discovered “for the first time a normal, traditional French family”.

She studied for France’s competitive higher education exams and passed them all. She chose the Polytechnic School because it offered remuneration to students. There were 22 women among 300 students, and Borne learned how to navigate a man’s world.

She graduated as an engineer with honors, a diploma that she considers “a free pass to a macho world”. She soon entered public service, where her commitment and ability to work opened doors.

In her political career, she became known for her high level of demand, her caustic humor, her inseparable cigarette —today, electronics— and her austerity. President of RAPT, she was going to her office by subway. Minister of Labor, she was returning home on foot. And today, even though the beautiful Hotel Matignon is her official residence, she continues to live in the two-bedroom apartment near the Montparnasse cemetery.

But it was her technical profile, combative posture and proximity to the French left that made Borne Macron’s chosen prime minister. The hope was that it would speed up and garner support outside the allied base parties for an ambitious reformist agenda that had everything to set the country on fire.

Fulfilling that task could make her something of France’s iron maiden, even if France’s reforms are not as liberalizing as those of Margaret Thatcher, the British prime minister for whom she was nicknamed in the 1980s. France leaves no doubt: Macron’s plan did not work.

The mountains of garbage that accumulate in the streets of Paris due to the street sweepers’ strike against the pension reform were turned into bonfires during the protests that broke out on Monday night (20) after two motions of censure were rejected by the National Assembly for narrow margin.

The motions were aimed at ousting Borne from office and reversing the automatic approval of the reform, obtained when the prime minister invoked article 49.3, a constitutional device that allows the government to approve bills without a parliamentary vote.

There are those who say that the firmness and serenity that Borne maintained during the most difficult parliamentary clashes of the reform were shaped by his history of suffering and stubborn life.

It is speculated that Macron could offer Borne, publicly isolated, to sacrifice to calm the nerves of the French who have radicalized the protests against the reform in the main cities of the country. But there are still two months left for Borne to surpass the mark of the first and only woman to hold the post of head of government before her.