It would be like abolishing Oxbridge, except that the establishment clout of the alumni of Britain’s two oldest universities pales into insignificance besides the power wielded in France by the select band of men and women known as enarques.
Almost unthinkably, the French parliament began a debate yesterday on closing down the Ecole Nationale d’Administration, the super-elite finishing school for technocrats which has furnished two of France’s last three presidents and six of its last eight prime ministers.
Ena, as it is widely known, is ”cut off from the people”, the ”fiefdom of a new state nobility” and a ”caste capable only of looking after the careers of its own members”, said Jean-Michel Fourgous and Hervé Novelli, the two conservative MPs who tabled the heretical motion.
The venerable establishment, founded in 1945 by General Charles de Gaulle to groom the people who would one day run France, had become ”a blockage in French society” and ”an absolute brake on all innovation”, the MPs said, a ”symbol of French archaism” and a ”high temple of the administered rather than the market economy”. It had to go.
The debate is more likely to lead to reforms than to the outright closure of Ena, but it reflects the new centre-right government’s preoccupation with reforming France’s bloated state apparatus, decentralising power and, above all, closing the gulf between the Paris governing elite and the disaffected electorate.
There are about 4 500 Ena graduates at work in France. Three quarters of them have a monopoly on the top jobs in the civil service, most of the rest are presidents or senior executives of public sector and part-privatised companies. In the previous Socialist-led cabinet, fully half the most senior 17 ministers were enarques.
Ena and the more junior grandes ecoles , Sciences-Po and the Ecole Polytechnique have over the years supplied France with a pool of super-mandarins able to push through ambitious schemes like the high-speed TGV train network and to govern forcefully.
But the system has incontestably widened the social divide in France, creating a hermetically sealed caste of self-interested power-players at the summit of the state who shamelessly hand each other the top jobs in a sad mockery of the ”equality” France boasts of in its national motto.
The two MPs (both close to the free-market Liberal Democracy party leader Alain Madelin, who once famously declared: ”Britain has the IRA, Spain has Eta, Italy has the mafia and France has Ena”) have proposed cutting the school’s 2003 budget from 30,9-million euros to 15,4-million, leaving it just enough to survive until the two current classes of 150 students each have completed their courses.
Another centre-right MP, Louis Giscard d’Estaing, the son of the former president who was himself an enarque, has tabled a less radical motion to simply cut Ena’s funds by ?5m a year, forcing a big reduction in its intake.
The present cabinet has only handful of Ena graduates: testimony to the prime minister Jean-Pierre Raffarin’s effort to erase the remote, aloof and elitist image of government seen as responsible for the massive protest vote against the mainstream parties of right and left in the tumultuous presidential election this spring.
But many parliamentarians, including Raffarin, a blokeish provincial who even had he applied to Ena would not have got in, seem unwilling to take the radical step of abolishing the institution.
”It’s useful to open the debate about Ena’s future,” a leading conservative MP, Jacques Barrot, said.
”But attacking the ultimate symbol of the administrative elite in France isn’t the real point — we have to reduce the excessive power and weight of the administration itself.” – Guardian Unlimited (c) Guardian Newspapers Limited 2001