FRANCE
French President, Emmanuel Macron has sent shockwaves through the country’s public sector establishment by saying that the prestigious Ecole Nationale d’Administration (ENA) should be abolished.
For generations the school has selected and trained the country’s top PS staff and political leaders, including former Presidents François Hollande and Jacques Chirac — and Mr Macron himself.
Many try repeatedly to pass the ENA’s notoriously tough entrance examinations, so desperate are they to get in.
Now the Strasbourg school’s most powerful former pupil has turned against it.
Determined to quell the “yellow vest” protest movement that has dogged him for months, Mr Macron believes the ENA no longer has a place in modern French society.
“If we want to build a society of equal opportunity and national excellence, we must reset the rules for recruitment, careers and access to the upper echelons of the Civil Service,” Mr Macron said.
“That’s why we will change the system of training, selection and career development by getting rid of the ENA and several other institutions.”
The ENA was established in 1945 by then President, Charles de Gaulle in the immediate aftermath of World War II.
Anthropologist Irène Bellier of France’s National Centre for Scientific Research said it was created “with a spirit of reconstructing France and renovating the state.
“The ideology was you’d raise a group of people capable of acting in the public interest,” she said.
Before the ENA, each Ministry had its own hiring process and standards, resulting in closed networks that almost exclusively favoured the upper class.
While it was designed as a meritocracy, research shows that ENA students’ parents are often senior PS employees or company chief executives themselves; very few come from working-class backgrounds.
Paris, 25 April 2019
