Emmanuel Macron promised it and will do it: the suppression, or rather, the transformation of the ENA, the temple of the formation of the French ruling class from the time of De Gaulle to the present day, will take place with a bill that will soon be approved by the Council of Ministers and will be transformed into law by Parliament by 7 June. Other Presidents before him (from Mitterrand to Chirac and Sarkozy) had announced it, but none had succeeded.
In 2019, faced with the protest of the Yellow vests who accused the State of being distant and insensitive to the needs of the people, of being led by a closed, self-referential ruling class, impervious to the requests that came from the territories, from small entrepreneurs and from the classes most affected by the crisis and by the effects of the economic transition and digital, Macron had recognized these limits of the French public administration and had attributed, at least in part, the responsibility for them to the selection and training criteria of senior public management.
This conviction was strengthened during the "Grand public debate" launched by Macron to reconnect the institutions with the country and which, despite many controversies, had nonetheless stimulated more than ten thousand meetings at the local level, many of which were attended by the President of the Republic, and two million contributions and suggestions on the dedicated site organized by the French Government. France, according to Macron, needed a great regeneration process, it had to get the social elevator back in motion, to offer young people "egalitè des chances", through a profound renewal operation that had to start from the descaling of the closed system of power - public and private – which ENA had created and shaped and of which it continued to represent the symbol and main architect. The enarchist they were the caste against which the excluded railed.
ENA, created by De Gaulle in 1947, was organized on the basis of the design defined by the Commission chaired by Thorez, deputy secretary of the French Communist Party and – the last fruit of the Front National which had led the French Resistance against the Germans – was built on an elitist and centralist vision shared by French culture, both Gaullist and Communist. A culture that today, in the face of multiculturalism, the emergence of a stronger political role of local administrations, the new systems of communication and sharing of public action is no longer able to give effective answers to the challenges that the institutions face they face.
In the first post-war decades, ENA had been a veritable brain forge for the reconstruction of the country: ministers, Presidents of the Republic, magistrates, senior state executives, bankers, managers of multinationals and large companies, conservatives and socialists had emerged who, with a system of revolving doors, passed from the public to the private sector, even several times in the span of a career. This mechanism, over time, has completely lost the perception of cultural and vision differences and of the nature of the interests represented by those who graduated from that school. An indistinct whole which, in the name ofrepublican esprit, he emphasized the sense of separateness from society, in which instead different cultures and bitter social conflicts emerged.
Moreover, the critics of ENA increasingly underlined that rather than a particularly talented cultural elite, the Ecole National d'Administration was now selecting a social elite since his accesses were de facto monopolized by Grandes Ecoles Paris, and especially from SciencePO (also today in a phase of deep crisis after the sex scandals involving its director Olivier Duhamel): and, in fact, the data is there to prove it, given that according to the most recent statistics, 80 percent of the new entrants to ENA in recent years are the children of former students. So: a formidable system of cooptation and self-perpetuation of the ruling class.
The same anti-Macronian propaganda continued to represent the young President of the Republic elected outside the traditional schemes of French bipartisanship, and the liberal reforms he promoted, as the result of an elitist culture, enarchist and, therefore, devoid of social sensitivity.
It was now time to act and therefore, at the conclusion of the "Grand debat", Emmanuel Macron appointed a commission chaired by Frédéric Thiriez (also enarchist, lawyer and now President of the French Football League) to identify the foundations of the reform: it is presumable that the bill announced last Thursday by the President of the Republic will follow the guidelines. The full-bodied Thiriez Report starts from a very severe analysis: ENA suffers from a lack of diversity, of completely unbalanced gender presence, of over-representation of the upper classes, effectively exercises the Parisian monopoly on competitions and is now unattractive.
First of all, the name will be changed: not anymore Ecole Nationale d'Administration ma Ecole d'Administration Publique-EAP. Access strictly by competition but diversification on a territorial basis and for previous training courses (no longer only from Grandes Ecoles). Six months of common course to be dedicated in part to the general framework that will have to form a common vision and awareness of the public function at the top administrative, technical and judicial levels and in all sectors of the administration, also from the point of view of values; a second part to be devoted to military training and, finally, a final part reserved for an operational internship. After which each student will be destined to one of the seven sector schools (proliferated in the meantime) including that for the judiciary. No final standings to avoid favoritism in assigning graduates to the most prestigious careers. For everyone a passage in the territorial administrations to understand local government issues. During the career, professional updates, mobility and career and salary advancements and stimuli for the transition from the public to the private sector.
The transformation operation will not be easy or quick, but it is a matter of a now mature change in public opinion which will hopefully succeed in overcoming the resistance already publicly expressed by the Association of former students of ENA and by those who are part of the power system that the ENA has expressed. Macron plays part of his prestige and a lot of credibility because he will certainly be evaluated on this symbolic reform in the next electoral campaign. But to profoundly transform the recruitment and training system of the haute function publique and its culture will take years and it will take determination and continuity on the part of the Government and the President of the Republic in implementing the reform. In the event of re-election, Macron will certainly want to complete the work started during the first term; but probably also in the – certainly not desirable – case of a victory by Marine Le Pen, the new President in the name of her battle against the establishment, would have an interest in giving continuity to Macroni's reform.
And we who don't have the ENA; we who, when an attempt was made to create something similar in 2006, immediately gave up on the project of selecting and training a bureaucracy open to innovation and united by a common vision of the constitutional values of the state and public administration, yielding to the resistance of the stronger bureaucracies that had their own school (ambassadors, state police, magistrates), can we now learn something from the French project? Absolutely yes. We can and must do it, making the most of the process of replacement and rejuvenation of public officials which will take place in the next few years and which Minister Brunetta has already started. The fundamental objectives should be to give a common training base and a common vision to officials of the different administrative levels, a fundamental requirement in such a fragmented multilevel system of which, with the pandemic, we have learned to know all the limits and shortcomings. A common management training at all levels and for all sectors could perhaps recover that unity of purpose and management principles which we have lost and which we will hardly recover through an improbable institutional reorganisation.
A second objective should be to re-establish, at all levels of governance, the technical bodies of public administrations in the traditional sectors of planning and construction of public works (sectors that have emptied from tangentopoli onwards and whose lack is among the main causes of our difficulty in carrying out small and large public works) and also in sectors that are increasingly becoming strategic: from healthcare to environmental sustainability, to the re-engineering of processes digital. The difficulties we are experiencing in preparing the Italian Next Generation Plan derive a lot from the lack of strategic, technical and operational management capacity. And we should also introduce permanent forms of updating and professional assessment. The State must equip itself as soon as possible because the coming years will be the years of reconstruction and revitalization of Europe and, within it, of the individual European countries. Without a renewed administration and management we will not be able to take up this challenge and probably, even in the public administration sector, we will see the emigration of the most talented young people thanks to a market which, even in senior public management, has become European.
