30 2GM Tuesday May 17 2022 | the times
Wo r l d
eclipsed by his prime minister. France
has never had a female head of state in
its history and only one woman prime
minister, Edith Cresson, who held the
job for less than a year after her ap-
pointment in 1991.
Her brief stint was blighted by con-
troversies, including her claim that
25 per cent of Anglo-Saxon men were
homosexual. She was accused of racism
when she compared the Japanese to
“yellow ants trying to take over the
world”. She was forced out of office after
the 1992 regional elections.
Cresson, 88, denounced the French
political class as “particularly back-
ward” and said it was extraordinary
that it had taken so long to have aPresident Macron has appointed
France’s second woman prime minister,
30 years after the last one, as he tries to
woo centre-left voters.
Elisabeth Borne, 61, who spent much
of her career as an adviser in Socialist-
led administrations before joining
Macron when he took power in 2017,
will lead the president’s centrist coali-
tion into parliamentary elections next
month.
She takes over from Jean Castex, 56,
a civil servant from a centre-right back-
ground who had a low public profile
before being put in charge of the gov-
ernment in 2020. He tendered his resig-
nation to Macron after saying that he
intended to leave politics, move back to
his native Pyrenees and paint the shut-
ters of his house.
Macron said Borne would focus on
“ecology, health, education, full em-
ployment, a democratic renaissance,
Europe and security”.
Her appointment ends his three-
week search for a prime minister cap-
able of symbolising a new direction for
the executive after Macron’s re-
election as president last month. He
had promised to give the job to a
woman but was turned down by at least
two on his shortlist and struggled to
find a figure who would symbolise his
commitment to ecology and social re-
form without alienating business.
Borne said she wanted to dedicate
her appointment to “all the little
girls, saying to them ‘don’t give up on
your dreams’ and that nothing must
slow the fight for the place of women
in our society”.
She is widely credited
with performing compe-
tently as labour minister
in the previous govern-
ment, when she over-
saw measures to end
the monopoly of the
state railway com-
pany and to curb France’s
unemployment benefits.
Yet she has faced criticism
from within Macron’s own
camp, notably because of her
technocratic style.
“She is as cold as an ice cube,”
one executive source told
French media, adding
that she might “scare
voters away”.
Some commentators
added that Borne’s rela-
tive lack of charisma
might have tipped the
scales in her favour,
given that the presi-
dent has no wish to beElisabeth Borne
was previously
labour minister
President Biden ordered the deploy-
ment of several hundred US troops to
Somalia to help local forces fight a
resurgent al-Shabaab, al-Qaeda’s most
deadly affiliate, as it steps up attacks.
The US said its special forces were
already based in the region but had
wasted time rotating in and out of
Somalia after President Trump ordered
them to leave in January last year.
Biden approved a Pentagon request
for standing authority to target a dozen
suspected leaders of al-Shabaab,
including those believed to be plotting
attacks outside Somalia’s borders, The
New York Times reported.
France’s first female PM
for 30 years seeks unity
second woman prime minister. She told
BFMTV that Borne was a “very good
choice because she is a remarkable per-
son, not because she is a woman”.
Borne’s appointment was seen as a
signal of Macron’s desire to mend
bridges in a country whose divisions
were exposed during the presidential
election campaign.
Although Macron, 44, won a com-
fortable victory over Marine Le Pen, 53,
the right-wing populist, in the second
round of the election, he remains dis-
liked across swathes of working-class
provincial France.
With the president keen to win back
centre-left voters disillusioned by what
many see as his drift right during his
first term, Borne’s first task will be to
implement measures designed to tackle
the cost-of-living crisis before the par-
liamentary elections.
Polls predict a comfortable victory
for Macron’s coalition.
The most strident opposition is being
voiced by a left-wing coalition led by
Jean-Luc Mélenchon, 70, who wants
France to leave Nato and introduce a
100 per cent inheritance tax rate on any
amount above €12 million.
Macron hopes that Borne will be able
to nullify the threat from Mélenchon,
who denounced her appointment as a
“fraud”. He said Borne might think of
herself as a left-wing woman “but we
will not give her this label”.
He claimed that Borne would con-
tinue with the policy of “ecological and
social abuse” that had marked Macron’s
first term.
Le Pen also hit out at Borne’s
appointment, saying that Macron had
demonstrated his inability to unite
people and his determination to pursue
“deconstruction of the state and social
wreckage”.
The prime minister’s post is, by gen-
eral consensus, a thankless one in
France. Incumbents are expected to
implement the president’s decisions but
take few personal initiatives.
When things go well, the president
takes the plaudits. When they go badly,
the prime minister is expected to take
the blame, allowing the head of state to
rise above it.Ju an C arlo s
France
Adam Sage Paris
The former King of Spain will end a
two-year self-imposed exile when he
visits his country this weekend.
Juan Carlos, 84, will travel to
Sanxenxo in Galicia on Saturday before
heading southeast to see his family near
Madrid, according to Fernando Ónega,
a radio journalist. Sanxenxo is hosting a
regatta in which Juan Carlos’s yacht
and former crewmates are competing
in the Six Metre Spanish Cup. He and
his crew are the defending world
champions in their class.
The visit will mark the end of one of
the most turbulent and humiliating
periods in Juan Carlos’s life. OnceSpain
Charlie Devereux MadridBloom of youth Girls take part in LasBiden sends American troops back into Somalia
Less than 500 US troops will be “per-
sistently” based in the east African
nation, fewer than the 750-strong con-
tingent ordered out by Trump, as Biden
seeks to avoid the impression of
another “forever war”.
Somalians celebrated a peaceful
transfer of power to Hassan Sheikh
Mohamud, 66, following months of
instability after his predecessor sought
to stay in power. Mohamud, who served
a first term in 2012-17, pledged to trans-
form Somalia into “a peaceful country
that is at peace with the world”.
His in-tray includes tackling a
drought that threatens millions of citi-
zens with starvation and the worsening
insurgency by al-Shabaab, which has
up to 10,000 well-trained and equippedfighters and claims to control swathes
of the south and centre of the country.
The focus of the president’s first day
at work was security. He was briefed by
his security chiefs and received Larry
André, the US envoy to Somalia.
Analysts have warned that a growing
threat from al-Shabaab cannot be chal-
lenged by raids and strikes alone.
Improving the lives of Somalians will
have more impact on sustainable peace.
Abdisalam Yusuf Guled, who was the
deputy director of the spy agency dur-
ing Mohamud’s first time in office, said
Washington’s decision was a surprise.
News of the return of American troops,
even at a reduced number, would offer
comfort to terrified citizens, he said.
A senior US administration officialsaid of the deployment: “First and fore-
most, the president [Biden] made this
decision to increase the safety and
effectiveness of our special operators.
“Against the advice of senior US mili-
tary leadership, the previous adminis-
tration had directed the withdrawal of
approximately 750 US military person-
nel from Somalia. It was an abrupt tran-
sition to a rotational presence. Since
then, al-Shabaab, the terrorist group in
Somalia that is al-Qaeda’s largest,
wealthiest and deadliest affiliate has
unfortunately only grown stronger. It
has increased the tempo of its attacks,
including against US personnel.”
It had killed “more than a dozen
Americans in east Africa, including
three in Manda Bay, Kenya, in 2020”.David Charter Washington
Jane Flanagan Africa Correspondent
Workaholic
nicknamed
‘Burn Out’
Profile
L
ike much of
the French
political class,
Elisabeth
Borne began
her working life in the
upper echelons of the
country’s civil service
(Adam Sage writes).
She was a prefect, or
interior ministry
representative, in
central France but
also an adviser to a
succession of left-wing
ministers, including
Ségolène Royal, 68,
the Socialist party’s
defeated candidate in
the 2007 presidential
election.
Borne has also held
public sector posts as
head of the Paris
transport authorityand director of
strategy at SNCF, the
state rail operator.
When Macron left
the socialist-led
government in 2016 to
launch his centrist
party and run for the
presidency, Borne
joined him. She was
rewarded with cabinet
jobs, holding the
transport portfolio
between 2017 and
2019, where she took
on and defeated rail
unions over the end of
the jobs-for-life
guarantee enjoyed by
staff. She was then put
in charge of the
ecology ministry
before being given the
labour portfolio in
2020, implementing a
controversial reform
of unemployment
benefits.
Although Macron is
widely seen as having
moved to the right
since taking office in
2017, Borne insisted in
a recent interview: “I
am a left-wingwoman. Social justice
and equality of
opportunity are what
I have fought for
during my life.”
Born in Paris, her
mother was a chemist
and her father a
Russian Jew who fled
to France in 1939 and
joined the Resistance.
Her parents opened a
pharmaceutical
laboratory after the
war, but her father
died when she was 11.
She said her childhood
was “not easy”
following his death.
Divorced with one
son, she is described
as a workaholic who
can be a demanding
task master, earning
the nickname “Burn
Out” at the Paris
transport authority.
She says she rarely
takes time off other
than to go for desert
walks. She once said
her greatest memory
was of walking across
the so-called Valley of
the Moon in Jordan.