One is a balding, bespectacled safe-pair-of-hands known for his negotiating skills; the other a firebrand orator of the French left who made his name riling big business, Brussels and Berlin.
Step forward Finance Minister Michel Sapin and Economy Minister Arnaud Montebourg, the odd couple now running the eurozone’s second largest economy since last week’s reshuffle. Their first joint task will be to explain why France again risks breaking promises to Europe to get its public finances in shape.
“We may have two heads, four hands and how ever many fingers and toes, but we have one single voice,” Sapin told reporters, with Montebourg by his side as they took office.
Nowhere will their voice need to be clearer than on France’s new effort to pull Europe away from tough budgetary rigour and towards growth. But, given their vastly different styles, the risk is that their audience – including other EU capitals, the financial markets and the French themselves – end up still unsure of where France is heading.
Sapin is a no-nonsense political fixer whose hobby is collecting antique coins. Montebourg is a handsome extrovert who showed off his forearms on a magazine cover in 2012, posing in a stripey T-shirt with a French-made electric mixer.
Sapin helped prepare France for the euro in the 1990s, while Montebourg now decries the single currency’s strength for choking off French business.
Mixed messages are an occupational hazard at “Bercy”, the sprawling finance and economics ministry in southeast Paris which, in Hollande’s first government, housed no fewer than seven ministers.
That was why Hollande and new Prime Minister Manuel Valls pared it down to a two-headed, German-style model with a finance minister in charge of the budget and an economics minister – nominally his junior –whose jobs is to rally economic recovery.
“Make no mistake – Michel Sapin is the French Wolfgang Schaeuble,” French official spin doctors texted journalists as details of Valls’ line-up begin to leak last week, referring to Berlin’s finance supremo.
Fittingly, it was in the German capital this week that the two showed how their working relationship would look.
Sapin, the ex-labour minister who last year secured delicate accords with French unions and employers on job market reform, stood next to Schaeuble and promised to stick to deficit-cutting pledges while carefully avoiding mention of specific deadlines.
Minutes later Montebourg, the former industry minister who has described EU economic policy as “totally useless”, popped up on local French television to insist the issue of public finances was “secondary” to that of securing growth.
At first glance somewhat contradictory, the two statements were just two different ways of re-stating what Hollande already signalled a week earlier: that France would ask EU partners to review the matter of its deficit promises.
French observers see Montebourg’s remarks as clearly calculated to play up Paris’s defiance of austerity policies to a home audience of Socialist lawmakers and left-wing voters.
“Naming [Montebourg] looks as if it was more about having a government that reflected all sensibilities,” said Christopher Dembik and analyst at Saxo Banque. “Political stripes have won the day over competence.”
Montebourg hit world headlines in 2012 when he led calls for the nationalisation of a Mittal steel plant threatened with closure and sided with trade unions over a Peugeot factory also due to be wound down just outside Paris.
Hollande needs feisty talk from Montebourg if he is to counter accusations by the far-right National Front that the government has handed over control of its finances to Berlin and Brussels – a pitch the resurgent anti-immigrant, anti-EU party hopes will resonate with voters in the EU elections.
Montebourg’s promotion and that of hard-leftist Benoit Hamon to Education Minister are intended to show the Socialist rank-and-file that there is a counterweight in government to Valls, whose centrism is often likened to that of British ex-premier Tony Blair.
Meanwhile it is Sapin, who befriended Hollande as far back as 1977 when the two shared barracks during military service, who has been entrusted with the task of re-negotiating France’s deficit commitments while proving Paris is serious about reform.
By end-April, he must send the European Commission details of France’s finances, including the €50 billion of public spending savings by 2017 that Hollande announced in January to trim the deficit while funding payroll tax cuts for business.
Few economists now believe France can fulfil its promise to the EU to cut the deficit from 4.3 per cent of output last year to under 3 per cent by an already delayed target of 2015. The market assumption is that Paris will have to ask for more time.
It is a case that could be easier to make this year than in the past: France is now likely to have an ally in new Italian Prime Minister Matteo Renzi, who has signalled he will use his 6-month presidency of the EU starting in July to push for an easing of the bloc’s fiscal rules.
And the prospect of opponents to EU-enforced austerity doing well in May’s European Parliament polls may prod Berlin and Brussles to “concede some leeway on the fiscal consolidation path”, Citi Research analysts concluded in an April 9 note.
But while the softly-softly bargaining skills of Sapin are suited to such discussions, a risk is that Montebourg’s more strident tone sours the mood on this or other EU matters, from trade to anti-trust policy.
“It’s one thing to try to skew policy through the back door, which France will try to do like everyone else in Europe,” Deutsche Bank economist Gilles Moec said. “But it’s another to be in your face. That’s the difference between Sapin and Montebourg: style matters.”