The
meddling M. Macron
According
to new reports on Monday, consolidation in telecoms is back on the agenda, with
Bouygues Telecom being the favourite prey. Bouygues is the only company to have
vigorously denied any talk of merger with one of the three other operators,
Orange, SFR or Free.
This is not
the first time that such discussions or negotiations have been in the news: at
the beginning of 2016, actual negotiations between Orange (ex. France Telecom)
and Bouygues Telecom, owned by the Bouygues building and public works company,
but also the owner of the TV station, TF1, were about to culminate in merger between
the two operators when the deal was reportedly scuppered by none other than
Emmanuel Macron, the Minister for Economic Affairs at the time and now of
course one of the front-running candidates in the presidential elections in
April and May. The reason mooted for his refusal was his hostility to the idea
that the family-controlled Bouygues group could take a large stake in a company
of which the French State still holds 34%.
If this is
true, that episode casts M. Macron in a somewhat different light than has been projected
so far. When he became the Minister of Economic Affairs of the newly appointed
Prime Minister, Manuel Valls, he was seen, like M. Valls himself, as the modernising face of the French Socialist party.
Although he had been to the same elite schools from which most of the French
establishment come (Sciences Politiques Paris and ENA), he had also worked for
a time, unusually for a minister of a socialist government, as an investment
banker and was considered to have few of the hang-ups about economic liberalism
and the role of markets that still encumber old style socialist champions of
the disappearing working class and ideological class warriors. True to this
modernist image, M. Macron went on to
sponsor legislation that aimed to liberalise a number of sectors by introducing
more competition into slumbering or monopoly areas as disparate as express coaches,
Sunday trading and some parts of the legal profession.
It had however
been forgotten, until the collapse of the deal between Orange and Bouygues,
that M. Macron had also, some months
before, miraculously found a large dollop of French taxpayers money to pay for
a bigger stake in Renault, of which the State already owned 15%, in order to
maintain its influence at a Shareholders General Meeting that threatened to dilute
it.
His apparent
refusal to countenance increased influence over Orange by a private telecoms
operator appeared to be driven by the same motives.
One of the
tempting conclusions from all this is that M. Macron, for all his youth,
modernity and supposed lack of dogmatism, qualities which make him an
attractive candidate to a French electorate in despair of the mainstream right
and left wing political parties, also shows the interventionist reflexes of
generations of French politicians and senior civil servants going all the way
back to Louis 14th and his famous: ‘L’état, c’est moi”.
The wider
question, to be explored further in this blog, is whether the leopard can
change his spots and become, if elected, the pragmatic and reforming president
that a majority of French voters say they want.
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