2023-07-13 19:45:27
Prime Minister Elisabeth Borne leaving the Council of Ministers at the Elysee Palace on July 13, 2023. GEOFFROY VAN DER HASSELT / AFP
In early summer, the round of prefects is usually substantial. The representatives of the State in the territories can be dismissed at the snap of a finger, and each of them knows that they can be asked to pack their boxes overnight to go and settle on the other side of the country. But the summer, which often offers a little respite from the march of the administration, is a period conducive to a vast game of musical chairs in the prefectures. The 2023 movement, announced Thursday July 13 by the government meeting in the Council of Ministers, does not cut it, while distinguishing itself from the precedents.
Firstly because he is of “unprecedented scale”, underlines the Ministry of the Interior: two regional prefects, twenty-six prefects of metropolitan departments, three overseas prefects and five delegate prefects. THE “last big move” before the Olympic and Paralympic Games, says the same source.
It is indeed “totally unprecedented under the Fifth Republic”, confirms Gildas Tanguy, lecturer in political science at Sciences Po Toulouse. Even if, underlines the researcher, great upheavals have already occurred in the 19th and 20th centuries, but in very different political configurations. And, that said, the political alternations (the election of the President of the Socialist Republic François Mitterrand in 1981, then those of Jacques Chirac in 1995, of Nicolas Sarkozy in 2007 and even the arrival of Emmanuel Macron at the Elysée in 2017) have never given rise to such a movement. In short, notes Mr. Tanguy, it is indeed a “Political and Institutional ‘Big Bang'”. Because it is necessary, in addition “analyze it as the logical continuation of the new managerial policy and more broadly of the reform of the senior civil service developed by the President of the Republic since 2017”continues the lecturer.
Since 2019, in fact, Emmanuel Macron has thoroughly reformed the National School of Administration (ENA), which became the National Institute of Public Service in 2022. Several large bodies, the statutes which govern certain functions of the administration, have also been removed. This was the case of the prefectural corps, the diplomatic corps or that of the General Inspectorate of Finance. The Head of State’s idea was to put an end to the state nobility, to abolish a system of « interest », in which the best elements of the ENA, by integrating the large bodies, were assured of a sheltered professional career. Instead, the reform intends to promote career paths based on merit and diversity of profiles. “The President of the Republic is undoubtedly the one who will have shaken up this great body the most with traditions and well-established rites”note by M. Tanguy.
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