Some denounce in advance the supposed lack of courage of civil servants who will agree to continue working with a far-right Prime Minister at Matignon; others, on the contrary, brandish the threat of a mass resignation of senior civil servants which would leave the National Rally without executives to operate the state apparatus, no doubt assuming that all civil servants are left-wing, which is far from being the case.
Any change thus leads to a wave of appointments “at the discretion of the government”. These include the positions of general secretaries and directors of central administration in ministries, prefects, ambassadors, rectors, presidents and general directors of public institutions, public enterprises and national companies, etc.
Networks of belonging have a determining importance in the choices that are made on this occasion. The executive is free to choose who it wants to appoint to fill these positions. And the National Rally, in the event of victory, will be no exception to the rule. If the RN came to power and decided to implement the policy of “national preference” that it promotes, this would raise serious legal and moral questions regarding respect for the principles of impartiality, equality of citizens before the law and access to public services. Senior officials in the most sensitive positions could be removed from their positions or resign if they do not want to work with the new government.
Each civil servant will decide what he wishes to do in his soul and conscience. But resigning is neither possible for most of them, nor desirable for the country. Furthermore, the law and jurisprudence guarantee the freedom of opinion of public officials and respect for hierarchical authority also leaves public officials a certain margin of appreciation on the means to be implemented and on the objectives pursued in the exercise of their functions.
A crisis in public services
Beyond these particular cases, it is very likely that the vast majority of civil servants will remain in their posts and the real subject is undoubtedly elsewhere. Since the mid-1990s, the existence of the civil service itself has been called into question by political leaders whose main objective is to reduce the cost and place of public services.
Nicolas Sarkozy has done a lot to weaken the state administration thanks to his “general review of public policies”. It has weakened ministries and multiplied public establishments that are less and less controlled by ministers, who consider themselves independent agencies. It left only skeletons of decentralized state administration in the departments and regions. The problem was aggravated by François Hollande who continued the same policy of reducing the administration’s resources, which he despised as much as his predecessor.
Finally, Emmanuel Macron wanted to deliver the final blow. A former civil servant himself but who has never really worked in the civil service, he is wary, like Donald Trump, of what he calls the “deep state”. By this, he means a supposed organized opposition of civil servants to his reform projects, which would explain why “things are not changing fast enough”, as he keeps repeating. He has strengthened the direct control of the President of the Republic over the senior civil service, so much so that if it were to show excessive docility towards a possible RN government, this work of domestication should be incriminated as much as the authoritarianism of the far-right party.
The method of appointing senior civil servants and the individual decisions they could be required to take are only one aspect, not the most important, of the crisis in public services. The more crucial question is whether the enterprise of destroying public services carried out for twenty years will be continued or whether it will finally be put to an end.
* Former student of ENA, retired senior civil servant, Jean-François Collin worked in different ministries (economy, agriculture, environment, culture and communication) and in the city of Paris. He was notably chief of staff to Louis Le Pensec, Dominique Voynet and Yves Cochet.