When Agnès Pannier-Runacher was appointed junior minister on October 16, 2018, this private-sector executive was looked upon with some contempt by career politicians. "A technocrat with no political skills," they murmured. Six years later, she's the only original Macron supporter to still have a seat at the cabinet's table.
On Saturday, September 21 she was appointed to the post of minister for the environmental transition and energy in Prime Minister Michel Barnier's government. In recent weeks, however, she was one of the voices in the central bloc warning against a right-wing shift within Macronism. "France is not on the right. I'm not the only one to think so, many of my colleagues tell me so too," she told the weekly magazine L'Express on August 8, 2024, advocating a broad alliance reaching all the way to the left. "This is a parallel truth that pollutes public debate. [France] is undoubtedly [on the right] when it comes to authority, but when it comes to economic and social matters, it's on the left."
Default choice
Initially, Barnier would have liked to choose someone from civil society or the left. But Pannier-Runacher eventually won this important ministry, after a long career in government.
At the Finance Ministry, she was first in charge of crafts and trade between 2018 and 2020. In this position, the former graduate of the prestigious National School of Administration (ENA) and friend of the president's chief of staff, Alexis Kohler, was forced to recuse herself from certain projects linked to companies for which she had worked (such as ski resort operator La Compagnie des Alpes). Ditto for utility company Engie, which employed her husband. Between 2020 and 2022, she was junior minister in charge of the industry and managed the plan to purchase vaccines to combat the Covid-19 pandemic, as well as the plan to revive certain industries, notably in the energy sector.
Well versed in her mission, Pannier-Runacher has a reputation for quickly grasping the challenges of the sectors for which she is responsible. At the head of the Ministry of Energy Transition from May 2022, she was expected to spearhead Macron's new strategy, unveiled a few months earlier. To "get the country out of fossil fuels," France is betting on both a strong revival of the nuclear industry and the development of renewable energies. In addition to the construction of new reactors, the minister defended an extremely controversial reform of nuclear safety governance (involving the merger of the Authority for Nuclear Safety and the Institute for Radiation Protection and Nuclear Safety), which has yet to be implemented, and launched a European Nuclear Alliance to promote nuclear power. She also promoted this policy internationally, representing France at the Conference of the Parties (COP) climate negotiations.
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