The senior foreign affairs officials will enter into a common pot of state directors, who will be able to evolve from one ministry to another throughout their careers. A measure that has attracted the anger of diplomats.
Le Monde with AFP
This is one of the components of the high public service reform committed by the government, desired by Emmanuel Macron and programmed for 2022. A decree appeared, Monday, April 18, in the Official Journal act The elimination of the diplomatic corps , which gave generations of ambassadors to France. A measure announced at the end of the year 2021, which had effervesce the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, a regular regular so felted of French diplomacy.
The FRONDE started to ride in October, when the subject became clarified. The measurement concerns two bodies at the heart of the workings of French diplomacy: that of foreign affairs councilors and that of the plenipotentiary ministers, “put in extinction” from 2023. These senior officials will then have to join a new “body” State directors “, where the executives so far trained by the National School of Administration (ENA), itself replaced by the National Institute of Public Service since January 2022.
The senior officials of foreign affairs will therefore enter a common pot of state directors, who will be intended to evolve from one department to another throughout their careers. In this future personal pool, diplomats will rub shoulders with prefects, sub-prefects or general inspectors of finance.
800 senior officials concerned
In total, some 800 senior officials of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs are concerned, out of 1,800 Class A executives. These staff are, to this day, either from ENA or, most often, recruited by the bias of the very selective East Contest. They will be able to stay in their old corps “in extinction”, but will be encouraged to switch into the new interdepartmental set, without high visibility, they fear in both cases, on the rest of their career. An evolution that goes wrong with interested parties.
“The reform causes a profound injury among the agents of the department and strong concerns”, in December, Olivier da Silva, a permanent of the CFDT of the Quai d’Orsay, very engaged against the project. “It is not improvised diplomat. It is really an apprenticeship that acquires on the ground, according to the assignments,”, for his part, was an ambassador in office abroad, interviewed by the France-Press agency (AFP).
In the eyes of his craftsmen, the reform, however, is to energize the careers by drawing up in a wider pool of candidates and by passing “a logic of status to that of employment”. “Public servants, nor private sector employees, are interchangeable,” had replied a group of diplomats gathered under the name of Théophile Delcasse, the Minister of Foreign Affairs who imposed the entrance examination in the diplomatic career, Until then a privilege of the nobility, at the beginning of the XX e century.