STRASBOURG — Thierry Breton was having dinner with his wife when his phone rang. It was Emmanuel Macron.
“I am always called when there is a fire,” Breton said, recalling the moment when the French president asked him to quit his job as CEO of one of the country’s most prominent tech companies and become a European commissioner.
The Frenchman talked to POLITICO at his temporary office in Strasbourg, just a few hours after the European Parliament voted to approve him and the 25 other members of Ursula von der Leyen’s top team.
Macron, indeed, needed a fireman.
His first pick, Sylvie Goulard, had been rejected by the European Parliament over ethics concerns.
“Europe is at a crossroads: faced with major technological and societal challenges, including in terms of culture and media” — Thierry Breton, French commissioner
Macron wanted to keep intact the sweeping portfolio he had negotiated, overseeing the EU’s internal market, industrial and digital policies, defense and space — a job so big that the Elysée was struggling to find qualified candidates.
Breton, who like Macron served as French economy minister before going on to head the tech giant Atos, asked to sleep on it. By morning he had made up his mind.
“Europe is at a crossroads: faced with major technological and societal challenges, including in terms of culture and media,” Breton said. “I am concerned about the economic situation as well,” he added. “That’s also why I said yes.”
At a time of heightened tensions between the world’s biggest economic powers, Breton’s portfolio is at the heart of today’s thorniest policy issues, including how the EU should deal with state-backed economies such as China, and his past stances on creating European champions and boosting the bloc’s technological sovereignty are bound to make waves.
France’s President Emmanuel Macron needed a savior — and Breton came to his rescue | Ludovic Marin/AFP via Getty Images
But the 64-year-old Frenchman is not your typical Eurocrat. An engineer by training, he has written science fiction novels on cyberwarfare, has taught at Harvard, and unlike most of his fellow commissioners, has spent most of his career in the private sector. He headed up French telecom operator France Télécom (now Orange), the electronics manufacturer Thomson and, most recently, Atos.
Breton’s high-level connections in political and business circles will come in handy if he is to complete the numerous missions von der Leyen has entrusted to him.
And the Frenchman is keen on moving fast — at the risk of getting carried away.
On his second day in office, Breton inadvertently dropped a bomb during a high-level meeting of EU ministers when he suggested putting “a new proposal on the table” on updated rules on the privacy of online communications: a controversial proposal the Council of the EU has been working on for three years.
He quickly nuanced a few hours later, adding: “All options are still on the table.”
The episode is in an illustration of the need for the former CEO to learn how to navigate the EU’s complex policy-making machine.
Internal debates
Breton, tasked with laying out a new industrial strategy for the EU and overseeing key digital files, will have to coordinate closely with fellow members of the College, including Executive Vice President for the Green Deal Frans Timmermans.
What will actually be in the new industrial strategy, and whether this will include a reform of EU competition rules, is one of the most fraught issues in Brussels.
While Breton has been a strong advocate for such a move, his new boss Margrethe Vestager, the Commission’s executive vice president for digital and EU competition chief, pushed back against the idea. He was in favor of the proposed merger of French and German engineering companies Alstom and Siemens that was blocked by the Dane under the previous mandate.
Breton played down their disagreements.
“I am here to be part of the College, not to create power struggles,” he said. “Governance is an extremely important topic for me. I have no qualms when it comes to it, everyone needs to remain in their roles.”
“Thierry Breton has the energy of movement and reform, he won’t play the status quo card” — Jean-Pierre Raffarin, former French prime minister
But the Frenchman is no stranger to internal frictions.
Back in 2005, as economy and finance minister, Breton made a splash by taking a public stance against France’s wealth tax — long a sore point for French conservatives — forcing the prime minister’s office to clarify that the government had no plans to change it.
Mathilde Lemoine, who was in then Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin’s Cabinet when Breton was finance minister — she is now chief economist at private banking group Edmond de Rothschild — said this led to “pretty animated meetings in Matignon [the prime minister’s headquarters].” She stressed though that Breton had a good working relationship with his counterparts and that his comment helped stir the conversation on broader fiscal reform.
Part of Breton’s plan to push things forward is to build new bridges between the three Commission departments he will oversee — the digital and internal market directorates general and a brand new one working on the bloc’s defense and space policy.
“We will integrate for the first time the importance of digital in all aspects of services, industry, tourism, culture and defense,” Breton said. “We need to draw the consequences, including in the way the [Commission’s] services function.”
He wants to break silos and create a network of scientists, PhDs and engineers, a parallel, informal structure that would spread across the three departments to foster innovation.
Breton’s ideas for reform are likely to stretch across the European Commission | Emmanuel Dunand/AFP via Getty Images
“Thierry Breton has the energy of movement and reform, he won’t play the status quo card,” said Jean-Pierre Raffarin, who was France’s prime minister when Breton joined the government.
Those ideas for reform are set to stretch beyond his already broad portfolio. Breton wants to create within the College of Commissioners an informal network of former finance ministers to talk about the EU economy and government debt — one of his political obsessions.
Breton should not expect a smooth ride. “He is not afraid of confrontation, he has nothing to prove and owes nothing to people around him,” said Alban Schmutz, a senior executive at French cloud computing company OVH, who worked on a cloud project with Breton in 2014.
He can also count on fierce opposition from the Greens, the left-wing GUE group and some of the Socialists in the European Parliament, who are still suspicious of his close ties with a business sector he will now regulate.
The French Socialists mentioned him as one of the reasons they abstained during the confirmation vote on von der Leyen’s College. “Thierry Breton’s nomination … raises unresolved issues of integrity and transparency,” they said in a statement.
‘Doing things fast is his thing’
Over the years, Breton earned a reputation as a savior of drowning companies or — depending on who you talk to — a cost cutter.
At France Télécom and Atos, he rolled out ambitious performance plans including thousands of job cuts at the former. At Atos, the management methods he used to increase productivity were perceived as harsh by some employees.
“When he arrived at Atos, he said he wanted to do two years in one. He is in a hurry and very efficient. Doing things fast is his thing,” said Marie-Christine Lebert, who represents employees on Atos’ board of administrators. “The employees have suffered a bit from that.”
“People in the Commission who were used to doing whatever they wanted are going to have problems” — Tech industry player
When asked about his reputation for cuts, an official who worked with Breton pointed out that he never forced through redundancy plans or cut the research and development budget, but instead focused on improving operational efficiency.
The man who banned internal emails at Atos to improve productivity — only to backtrack later — might run into hurdles when trying to shake up EU bureaucracy though.
“People in the Commission who were used to doing whatever they wanted are going to have problems,” said a tech industry player, who declined to be named.
People skills
The French commissioner has a reputation for making friends in the right places.
“Breton has been the best buddy of each French president. He is good at making friends primarily to defend his own interests,” a high-ranking French official close to the French Socialists said. “He would harass [former President] François Hollande with new proposals of all kinds.”
Everyone agrees though that Breton is good at winning people over.
“When he started as economy and finance minister, some MPs in the National Assembly looked down on him, considering he wasn’t a member of the old boy political network,” Jean-François Copé, a former president of the conservative party UMP — now Les Républicains — and Breton’s deputy minister for budget from 2005 to 2007, said. “He managed to earn their respect, because he took enough time to talk to them.”
Breton with his new boss, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen | Kenzo Tribouillard/AFP via Getty Images
Multiple people who worked closely with him described him as a demanding, hands-on manager who listens to his staff.
“I found him to be very engaged,” Lemoine, from Villepin’s Cabinet, said. “He is very attentive to whoever he is talking to.”
Breton feels confident he has what it takes to implement his vision. “I know what needs to be done. I know the worldwide tech actors fairly well, including personally,” said the man who was once welcomed in the home of Microsoft’s co-founder Bill Gates.
Those personal contacts will come in handy while pushing his remit to help Europe achieve “technological sovereignty” by decreasing its reliance on Chinese and American companies in strategic areas such as defense and digital infrastructure.
“I, of course, have a vision of the fact that we should fully use the Continent’s formidable capacities on digital — we also need to provide answers on data,” he added.
German connection
Breton, who has German grandchildren living in Berlin and speaks some German, is likely to leverage his close ties with politicians and business leaders in Berlin to push forward his agenda, at a time when Macron and Chancellor Angela Merkel at are loggerheads on topics such as defense.
“He had a vision of the Franco-German relationship [that] he put in practice at Atos,” said former Prime Minister Raffarin.
In 2011, Atos bought Siemens’ IT division. The German industrial manufacturing company became Atos’ first shareholder and Breton moved part of the company’s headquarters to Munich.
Two years later, he worked for the Commission on cloud computing with Jim Snabe, then CEO of German software company SAP and now Siemens’ chairman.
Breton was formerly the top dog at tech giant Atos | Eric Piermont/AFP via Getty Images
The French commissioner, a long advocate of a European defense and security fund, will have to convince Germany and other EU countries to spend more money on defense, among other things.
“We need to find a way to invest again in defense at the Continent’s level, while respecting our cultural differences,” he said. “We cannot rush Europe — we cannot rush Europe in general, but even less so on those issues.”
Brussels may be about to discover that Breton’s idea of a sedate pace is uncomfortably quick.
Maïa de La Baume and Marion Solletty contributed reporting.
