Martine Aubry loses out as François Hollande picks line-up of moderates

FRENCH president François Hollande named a government dominated by moderate left-wingers last night, after Socialist Party boss Martine Aubry, overlooked for the post of prime minister, said she no longer wanted to be part of the new cabinet.

Mr Hollande, sworn in a day earlier as France’s first Socialist president in 17 years, named Pierre Moscovici as finance minister and Laurent Fabius as foreign minister, key posts under prime minister Jean-Marc Ayrault, a social democrat like them.

Mr Moscovici takes charge of an economy lumbered with a jobless rate of almost 10 per cent and the challenge of cutting heavy debts, as Mr Hollande launches his campaign against austerity in Europe.

The new line-up is set to meet for the first time today before Mr Hollande heads to summits of the G8 group of wealthy countries, and another one for Nato, in the United States.

Ms Aubry, who last year lost a contest against Mr Hollande to run for president on the Socialist ticket, made it clear she would stay away rather than settle for a consolation post – removing an experienced former minister from the team.

Ms Aubry, daughter of former European Commission chief Jacques Delors and architect of France’s 35-hour week as labour minister in the last left-wing government of 1997-2002, told Le Monde newspaper: “I talked with François Hollande. He said he had settled for Jean-Marc Ayrault. We agreed that under this configuration, my presence in the government made little sense.”

Mr Ayrault, who, like Mr Hollande, has never been a minister, will head up a team that mixes old hands and new blood.

Manuel Valls, 49, the closest thing his party has to a right-winger, was named interior minister. Najat Vallaud Belkacem, 34, one of Hollande’s campaign team, was named government spokeswoman. She was one of several women recruited to a cabinet Mr Hollande said should comprise both sexes in equal number.

Mr Moscovici, a graduate of the elite ENA civil service school, who was Mr Hollande’s presidential campaign chief, initially had been expected to get a post other than finance. The 54-year-old is an English speaker who served as a junior European affairs minister in a Socialist-led coalition a decade ago.

He wound up taking a key job that was long expected to go to Michel Sapin, one of Mr Hollande’s closest long-time friends and a figure who believes blanket austerity risks plunging the eurozone into deep recession.

Mr Sapin became labour minister, while Arnaud Montebourg, an outspoken lawyer and member of parliament who has made a name for himself as a critic of globalisation, was put in charge of industrial revival.

Mr Fabius, the new face of foreign policy, was prime minister at just 37 in 1984, under the late Socialist president François Mitterrand and served as finance minister for former prime minister Lionel Jospin in 2000-2.

He has been more of an enemy than friend of Mr Hollande in the past. Mr Fabius, 65, treated Mr Hollande with disdain when the two men clashed in 2005 over the referendum on a European Constitutional treaty.