The economy is tanking, your citizens are fleeing and your Presidency is the least popular in modern history. So where better for the French to get advice than the London School of Economics? François Hollande has just appointed youthful Emmanuel Macron as his new Minister of the Economy. Macron, 36, earned the sobriquet le Loup de Bercy (the Wolf of Bercy, the Parisian district that houses France’s financial ministries) after a meteoric career in banking and politics.
But will it be the LSE that gives Macron his intellectual succour? He has just signed up as a visiting fellow, normally a research post. “Emmanuel Macron is still due to join LSE as a Visiting Senior Fellow in its European Institute from this month,” confirms a spokesman for the LSE while acknowledging that he does have “other rather more pressing responsibilities” now.
The politico upon whom Hollande is pinning his economic hopes already has an interesting insight into the dynamic between tutor and student: he married his own French teacher, who taught him when he was 17 and is 20 years older than him.
But back to academia — the LSE is a world-renowned school of government and economics and, in his role at the school, Macron will be rubbing shoulders with the great and the good of the British economic establishment.
Ex-Bank of England Governor Mervyn King has also taken up a visiting professorship there recently, as has his former deputy Charlie Bean, both in the economics department. Will Macron return speaking Anglo-Saxon economics?
