Bombshell as France's EU commissioner Breton quits, criticises von der Leyen

FRANCE 24 English

Visit our website: http://www.france24.com  Like us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/FRANCE24.English  Follow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/France24_en

Transcript

00:00Armand Georgian is with me now, he's our Europe editor. Armand, as I say this was

00:04unexpected, it was abrupt, do we know what happened? Well we do because Thierry

00:09Breton wrote a resignation letter which he's published on social media and

00:14certainly doesn't mince any words there. He says to Ursula von der Leyen, so the

00:20President of the European Commission, that she asked France to withdraw his

00:25name for personal reasons that she did not discuss with him. So the way all of

00:32this works Nadia is that if a country wants to keep their incumbent

00:37Commissioner in Brussels, they can do that without nominating new people for

00:42the post and Macron made it clear all along that he wanted to keep Thierry

00:47Breton. So it's true that it's a complete break with protocol to ask a

00:51country that had already said in this case we want to keep Breton to be asked

00:55that he should be withdrawn and this just a day before von der Leyen unveiled

01:01her new lineup. As you said the fact is that the relationship had clearly broken

01:05down, they'd had various run-ins and the one thing that you can't do as a

01:09European Commissioner is publicly criticize your boss. He questioned her

01:15credibility earlier this year when she was chosen to be the European People's

01:22Party candidate in the European election. He said that she barely had the support

01:26of her own party. That obviously did not go down well with von der Leyen. He also

01:32quite openly, was openly critical of her over the so-called Peepergate affair

01:38which was an alleged nepotism story which hit Ursula von der Leyen also just

01:45before earlier this year. So the relationship was not good and clearly

01:51things came to a head at this very critical juncture. And tell us then about

01:55his replacement, the outgoing Foreign Minister Stéphane Séjourné. Well Séjourné

02:02is a Macron loyalist. He was an advisor to President Macron when Macron was a

02:07minister of the economy and Séjourné is one of the closest confidants of

02:13Macron from the very early days of the whole movement that Macron started which

02:18was at the time called En Marche or On the Move. Then it became Republic On the

02:23Move of course. He was perhaps Macron's closest ally in in the European

02:29Parliament for five years as head of the Renew group of MEPs from 2019 until 2024

02:37and then for the last eight months he's been Foreign Minister of France. So he

02:42now goes back in a sense to a place that he knows very well, Brussels. He has

02:47of course great contacts there but crucially he is both an ally of President

02:53Macron and he's not known to be a problem for Ursula von der Leyen. So in

02:59that sense he ticks a few boxes. One box that he doesn't tick is that he's not a

03:03woman and von der Leyen has been trying to, she's been caught in this very

03:08delicate sort of negotiations with member states to have a political

03:13balance but also a gender balance in this new European Commission. Some

03:17political figures here in France said that she, sorry that Macron should have

03:22nominated a woman once it became clear that Breton was out but of course this

03:26is all going down to the wire. There wasn't much time to make a decision

03:30because as we've said this new lineup is going to be unveiled tomorrow morning so

03:36Wednesday morning in the European Parliament. We'll obviously bring you all

03:39those details Nadia. I'll be here also to kind of try to unpack all the

03:45picks that she's going to come up with including that question of gender

03:49balance as well. All right, sounds interesting. That's tomorrow morning is

03:51it? Armen Georgian for us there.

Category

Transcript

Recommended