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00:00 Well for more we can speak to Paul Smith, head of the French department at the University
00:04 of Nottingham. Paul, thank you for joining the program and speaking to us.
00:08 Just want to ask you, first of all, usually after these cabinet meetings we get a statement
00:14 afterward that was not the case this Friday. What do you make of that?
00:18 Well, I think that there's been a lot of criticism of this new team and I think the,
00:25 probably by not saying anything, they kind of want to just get on with work and
00:30 they're waiting for the second volley. I mean you talk about the limited number of ministers in this
00:36 team but we're going to be waiting for the announcement of junior ministers next week or
00:40 the week after so this could actually be, it could be a smaller, you know, fewer than 40 members of
00:45 the government but it could probably still add up to somewhere nearer to 30 once we add in all the
00:50 junior ministers. I think that in many ways it tells us that this is a government that's been
00:57 appointed, a team that's been appointed to carry out the, in a sense the statement was, Macron's
01:03 statement on the 31st of December, that plan, you know, the determination, rearm from, introduce
01:10 a sense of civic pride and civic duty, that kind of discourse. So in a sense that's serving as the
01:17 program. Yeah one of the things we did see come out was that Macron wants, forgive me for my French
01:22 Paul, "révolutionnaire pas de gestionnaire" I would translate sort of like he wants trailblazers
01:28 and not technocrats. Is that what he has in the cabinet? No I wouldn't have said so. Actually,
01:35 I mean I think that one of the things that's really striking me is not so much the people
01:40 who've stayed but the bundling up of ministries. For example under Amélie Oudéa Castillard,
01:46 you've got that bundling up of education with youth and the Olympic Games and you mentioned
01:51 Catherine Vautrin as well, that bundling up of health with welfare and labour. And so those are
01:57 kind of almost like two super ministries. Now in order for those to work, you're actually going to
02:03 be relying on technocrats to be carrying out the, and you can talk about delivering efficiencies,
02:09 well okay, but these are really important and I know that in education the teachers unions are
02:14 really concerned that they haven't got a minister dedicated to them and there's a lot of talk as
02:19 well about health is in a really difficult position in France at the moment and there's
02:24 a lot of concern there that there isn't actually a specific health minister. So I think that what
02:30 happens in that situation is actually that this is where the technocrats take over rather than,
02:35 I mean you're right, "révolutionnaire plutôt que gestionnaire", revolutionary rather than just
02:40 managing things. But I think that that's a big promise. And in how much of what we saw in terms
02:50 of the composition of this cabinet would you link back to Emmanuel Macron's controversial immigration
02:55 bill? To some extent yes. I mean there's the problems of getting out through, I mean that
03:03 was badly managed in the first place and it's interesting that we've got these ministers who
03:07 come from backgrounds with Sarkozy. Sarkozy advised Macron to do it in two parts, the immigration
03:12 bill. To look at a bill that talks about regularizing the situation of illegal migrants
03:18 and then to think about another more kind of austere bill to deal with other aspects of
03:23 immigration. Macron didn't listen to that, they went for one piece of legislation.
03:27 I think that Darmanin is lucky to still be there because he didn't handle the immigration bill
03:32 terribly well but one could argue that it wasn't his fault. But I think that where Atal scores and
03:39 what's also going on with bringing in some of these Sarkozy's is that it's also kind of, I think it's
03:46 what Macron imagines would be a cabinet to stand up to the "Rassemblement National" the far right
03:52 and the European elections. This is a cabinet that's really going to try to focus on the
03:56 European elections because in France those aren't really about Europe, they're much more to do with
04:02 the government's performance. And so we've got this five month gap now where that's really going
04:07 to be the focus. And right after that of course the Olympic Games. I'm curious, we talk about the
04:11 cabinet tilting to the right. Is this abandoning its centrist base or has this centrist part of
04:20 French voters also become more conservative and it's chasing, it's playing catch up? Yes, I think
04:25 that's absolutely right. I think that there's been a general shift and I was thinking about
04:30 this the other day when somebody said that Atal kind of comes from the left. I don't even know
04:33 what that means really anymore in terms of Macron's politics. Yes, okay, originally he was more towards
04:39 the left than some of the other members but this is a drift that we've observed since the first
04:44 Macron presidency, this kind of rightwards shift. And that's where the voters are and this of course
04:50 is why Ciotti is so upset about the appointment of Rashida Dati is that once again we have Macron
04:56 grabbing the air, the oxygen if you like, of the of Les Républicains where they should,
05:03 they feel they should be. Yeah, meanwhile the people on the left side of his centrist
05:09 Renaissance party also feel abandoned. Yeah, absolutely. There's a great deal of, originally,
05:15 already over the immigration bill there's a great deal of upset there and there will be a lot of
05:21 people on the left of Renaissance who are kind of biting their lip and thinking what's next.
05:26 All right, Paul, thank you very much for your time. Paul Smith speaking to us
05:31 from the University of Nottingham.