Among the words that sum up what Emmanuel Macron wishes his fresh young presidency to mean for France, three carry special force: change, diversity and inexperience.
Laetitia Avia, one of the brighter young members of the wider team with which he hopes to transform the nation, embodies all three.
The daughter of low-paid Togolese immigrants – an airport baggage handler and a care worker – Avia is a shining example of what the French are already calling ”the generation Macron”.
Change and diversity define her life. Proud of her working-class origins, she is prouder still to have triumphed over relative adversity to excel at university and become a successful lawyer.
But as she offers herself to Parisian voters as a parliamentary candidate, she also has a curriculum vitae without trace of serious political apprenticeship, let alone elected office.
She’s what Macron’s movement, its name now extended from En Marche! (Forward!) to La République En Marche!, hails as a product of “civil society”, people willing to serve the country, having varied practical knowledge of key sectors of everyday life, but in many cases, no past involvement in politics.
Macron showed on May 7, with his thumping victory over the far-right candidate Marine Le Pen, that in a country that outsiders sometimes see as ungovernable, the absence of political know-how is no longer fatal to electoral appeal. Inexperience, in other words, can be a positive aspect of the Macron revolution.
Macron did serve as economics minister in the government of Francois Hollande, the president he replaces. But that was as a co-opted, not elected, member of government. Avia doesn’t even harbour pressing ambitions to become a career politician.
“Yes, it’s important, a time for investment and commitment,” she says. “But it is necessary, too, to know when to make room for others. Renewal must be continuous.”
However short her active involvement in politics may be, Avia is part of a wave of idealism that swept France during the election campaign.
That surge, combining optimism and a desire for a clean break from an uninspiring recent past, was driven by the hope, even belief, that France can at last banish the traditional wrangling of the two parties of power from left and right. Both of those sides were missing from the decisive second-round run-off.
With roughly equal measures of steely resolve and questionable romance, Macron now vows to construct a fair, go-ahead society that cherishes education, rewards endeavour and offers the chance of enhancement. He has drawn his first government from interests representing the left, right and centre. Nicolas Hulot, a seasoned ecology campaigner and a thorn in the flesh for successive administrations, is remarkably the No 3 in Macron’s government, as environment minister.
Whether or not Avia privately aspires one day to join them, she’s the first to acknowledge that her own progress doesn’t reflect the typical experience of the children of immigrants growing up in Seine-Saint-Denis, her native district on the north-eastern outskirts of Paris.
Now 31, she won a scholarship that changed the course of her life. The education it provided, taking her from the prestigious Sciences Po university (the Paris Institute of Political Studies) to further academic pursuits in Canada, has served her well.
“I am a girl from the working-class areas,” she says. “At the same time, I’m now also quite bo-bo [bourgeois-bohemian].”
If she wins the seat that she’s contesting in Paris’s 12th arrondissement, held by a socialist in the parliament about to take its new shape after legislative elections in June, she will immediately form an example of Macron’s emphasis on ability irrespective of gender, colour or background. But she would not by any means be the first French parliamentarian of ethnic origin.
The education and employment ministers in Hollande’s final cabinet, Najat Vallaud-Belkacem and Myriam El Khomri respectively, were born in Morocco. Christiane Taubira, who served as justice minister before falling out with the president over plans – later abandoned – to strip dual-nationality people of French citizenship if convicted of terrorism, is from French Guiana. George Pau-Langevin, who was a junior education minister, is from Guadeloupe. Even Hollande’s centre-right predecessor Nicolas Sarkozy, happy to be portrayed as a scourge of lawless – and predominantly black or Arab – elements in the banlieues, pointedly chose diversity as a virtue in his ministerial appointments.
By comparison, Macron has hardly shown boldness in his ministerial choices. There’s a black Olympic medal-winning fencer, Laura Flessel-Colovic, born in Guadeloupe; Gérald Darmanin – whose grandfather was Algerian – is an economy minister; and Mounir Mahjoubi, from modest Moroccan roots, takes charge of digital affairs. But this is parity at a level the French would tend to describe as “correct” rather than mould-breaking.
For now, Macron’s bridge-building is happening in different ways. In terms of male and female ministers, the composition of his government is scrupulously 11-11, albeit with a man, Édouard Philippe, above them as prime minster.
Equality is happening more strikingly at Avia’s level. A former female bullfighter and a celebrity mathematician are among the quirkier of her fellow candidates for the June elections. But again, Macron has kept to his word on gender: 214 men and 214 women, and on his determination to draw on talented, like-minded and often young people who feel no connection to the Parti Socialiste and centre-right Les Républicains, even less to the extremes of left and right, Jean-Luc Mélenchon and Le Pen.
For his admirers, Macron won the presidential election because France, disenchanted with the old guard, craved something new and didn’t want it to take the form of Le Pen and a programme inspired by ruinous protectionism and the fear of foreigners.
Avia saw the merit of his project from the moment he launched what was then simply En Marche!, the initials the same as his own, in April last year. “Having been there from the start, his investiture was for us an occasion rich in emotion, a magnificent day,” she said.
Now the hard work begins: overcoming trade unions and others resistant to any change that affects them, winning parliamentary elections and – if necessary – forging accords with other parties to avoid fractious coalition government or, worse, “cohabitation”, with power messily divided between the centrist in the Élysée (Macron) and whoever dominates parliament.
Avia’s idealism – her commitment to change and diversity – tells her the future is bright. Her lack of experience may suggest there are pitfalls ahead, but many in France are welcoming – for now – the breath of fresh air.
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