After months of a governance crisis, the two governing bodies of Sciences Po Paris have designated diplomat Luis Vassy, 44, as the future director of this prestigious school, we learned this Friday, September 20 from the institution.
The board of directors of the National Foundation for Political Science (FNSP), which oversees Sciences Po, chose Luis Vassy on Friday from among the two candidates remaining in the running, by 19 votes out of 25 voters, we learned from the school. The day before, the board of the Institute, the institution’s internal governance body, had also voted in favor of this ENA graduate from the same class as Emmanuel Macron.
“A triple renovation”
In his application project, the 44-year-old Franco-Uruguayan believed that Sciences Po should “consider a triple renovation”. He considered that the institution, which had had a rather tumultuous life in recent years, should renovate its image, its project and its governance and its funding, with Europe “at its heart”. A graduate of the École Normale Supérieure and ENA, Luis Vassy has headed the office of successive foreign ministers, Catherine Colonna, then Stéphane Séjourné, since 2022, after having been notably French ambassador to the Netherlands.
The appointment of this new director should put an end to the repeated governance crises, with the latest episode being the resignation in March of its former director Mathias Vicherat, who was brought before the courts with his partner in a domestic violence case.