Elizabeth Bourne, who heads the government of President Emanuel Macron as the first woman prime minister in more than 30 years, is an experienced technocrat who enjoys the full confidence of the French leader.
The 61-year-old engineer proved her loyalty to Macron during his first term, when from 2020 she held the post of Minister of Transport, Environment and, finally, Labor. Bourne is known for pursuing controversial transport reforms and benefits that will be seen as a significant advantage as Macron seeks to promote a highly controversial application to raise the retirement age in France during his second term.
Bourne will seek to exert more influence than France’s first female prime minister, Edith Cressan, who lasted less than a year in the early 1990s. Macron said he wants a woman with left and environmental confidence, and Bourne has ticked off many spaces.
Before the second round of the presidential election in April, the president promised to base his second term on the climate crisis and to instruct his prime minister on “environmental planning.” As labor minister during the Covid-19 pandemic, Bourne has supported a number of measures to boost the employment of the younger generation.
Bourne, who is said to have restrained vapes in the National Assembly parliament, regularly appeared on television in the midst of the pandemic to remind the French to work from home and defend the government’s job preservation scheme. Hospitalized because of the virus in March 2021, she was given oxygen, and she called the experience devastating.
“True technocrat”
She is far from an extroverted figure who can overshadow the president in any way, but she is a reliable pair of hands that Macron can trust in a difficult time.
“She is a real technocrat,” said a union source, who asked not to be named. And in the corridors of the ministries where she served, it is said that she received the nickname “Expressed” for alleged cruelty to their employees, a play on words with “burn out”.
The second woman in history, the Prime Minister of France was born in Paris and studied at the elite Polytechnic School. According to an April poll conducted by Ifop, 45 percent of respondents did not know who she was.
Little is known about her private life, except that she was born to a father who died when she was young, and to a mother with a very low income. A lover of mathematics, Bourne said she finds in numbers “something quite encouraging, completely rational.”
(Written by Charlotte Hill / Eleanor Hughes)
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