Extended breaks in exotic foreign lands – or, at the very least, the Riviera – are so over. These days, the most a French government minister can expect in the way of a summer holiday is a couple of days in Normandy, preferably in a tent.
Hit by dire popularity ratings, assorted scandals and persistent economic woes, François Hollande, the president, has in previous years felt obliged to ask his cabinet to confine themselves to France and stay away no longer than a fortnight.
This year, with the country’s state of emergency extended for a further six months following a string of terror attacks and presidential and parliamentary elections in the offing, the instructions are even stricter.
Officially, the cabinet meets for the last time before its three-week summer break on Wednesday. But seemingly determined that senior ministers should not be seen absent from office – not to mention sunning themselves – at such a critical time, Hollande has scheduled security meetings throughout the summer.
“I didn’t get a holiday last year and I’m fairly sure I won’t get one this year,” said the government spokesman, Stéphane le Foll, who along with the prime minister, Manuel Valls, interior minister Bernard Cazeneuve, defence minister Jean-Yves Le Drian, justice minister Jean-Jacques Urvoas and foreign affairs minister Jean-Marc Ayrault, will attend the weekly meetings at the Élysée Palace.
According to Europe 1 radio, Valls will spend a short time in Provence with his family but commute from Paris; Cazeneuve is grabbing “a day or two” at his house an hour north of the capital; Le Drian has abandoned plans to go to Spain, and Urvoas will profit from a brief break to the southern Vaucluse to visit three prisons.
While not required for the security summits, the rest of the government has clearly got the message. “It looks like a competition to find the least ostentatious destination,” the radio said. The finance minister, Michel Sapin, will be on the Atlantic island of Ile d’Yeu, and the labour minister, Myriam El Khomri, in Gironde.
Axelle Lemaire, the deputy minister for digital affairs, has done particularly well: her summer holiday, she has said, will be under canvas. But the environment minister, Ségolène Royal, takes the top prize, said Le Point: she is spending August in the Antarctic, on a scientific mission.
With the nation as fraught, angry and divided as it is, “political reality – or public relations – have plainly won out”, Europe 1 said. Perhaps ill-advisedly: given France’s current state, the clear minds gained from a proper holiday “might not altogether be a bad thing”.
