It is common, when French Eurocrats of a certain age get together, for them to discuss their experiences of compatriots who were leading figures in the European Commission in the last decades of the 20th century. The Commission was shaped not just by Emile Noel – its secretary-general for 29 years (1958-87), but also by the likes of Guy Legras, Jean-Paul Mingasson and François Lamoureux, who at different times and from different people commanded respect, fear and, occasionally, loathing.
The departure last week of Hervé Jouanjean, director-general for budget, leaves Jean-Luc Demarty, the director-general for trade, as the last Frenchman in the Commission’s senior ranks who is a link to that generation (he worked for Jacques Delors in Paris before coming to the Commission and joining the Delors cabinet).
When those same French Eurocrats discuss who in the future might compare to those giants, the name of Olivier Guersent frequently comes up. Now 52, on 1 July he will take up his new role as Commission deputy director-general for the internal market.
He has spent the current Commission mandate heading the private office of Michel Barnier, the European commissioner for internal market and services. Together they have driven through momentous reforms of the European Union’s banking sector in response to a financial crisis so grave that it threatened the euro’s very existence.
Guersent’s latest appointment did not come as a surprise. He has been on an upward trajectory – with one calamitous interruption – ever since he arrived at the Commission in 1992. The French government had plucked him from its own competition department and sent him as a ‘national expert’ to the Commission’s merger unit. Using new powers and new roles, the Commission had just blocked a merger for the first time – specifically the bid by French Aerospatiale and Italy’s Alenia e Salenia for Canadian plane-maker De Havilland. The French political establishment was apoplectic.
Guersent – a graduate of a provincial Sciences Po, not of the Ecole Nationale d’Administration – arrived in Brussels at an opportune time, in the last years of Delors’s presidency. The Commission was just beginning to flex its muscles as a competition authority. A proposed merger between Siemens and Philips fell apart after the Commission opened an in-depth investigation. Lawyers and officials made their reputations on the back of the new merger rules that had been adopted in 1989. Guersent was one of the officials who proved critics wrong by showing that the Commission could meet tough deadlines and respect companies’ confidentiality.
Guersent moved from the competition department to the private team of the then commissioner for competition, Karel Van Miert, a Flemish socialist, as an adviser on mergers and state aid. The Commission infuriated the government of French President Jacques Chirac by ordering a vast restructuring and the eventual privatisation of Crédit Lyonnais, following a third state bail-out. It also extracted painful remedies from Boeing as a condition of allowing its merger with McDonnell Douglas (the eventual approval also angered the French).
In 1999, several law firms sought to tempt Guersent, whose parents were also civil servants, into private practice. Instead, he joined the cabinet of Barnier, who had just become commissioner for regional policy. The decision forged a bond that was to be renewed ten years and two Commissions later.
In 2001, Alexander Schaub, the director-general for competition, lured Guersent back to the department to be one of the architects of the Commission’s modern and much tougher approach to cartels. Guersent set up a unit dedicated to investigating the numerous immunity applications landing on the Commission’s desk. In 2001-02, the Commission made as many cartel decisions as it had in 1994-2000.
At the start of José Manuel Barroso’s first administration, Guersent became number two in the private office of Neelie Kroes, who had taken over as the European commissioner for competition. The Commission imposed an unprecedented €2.46 billion of cartel fines in those two years. Guersent was then briefly director for cartels in 2009, until the second call from Barnier came.
The two make an unlikely pair. Barnier is a centre-right politician, while his right-hand man leans to the left. The commissioner is prone to emotion and rhetorical flourishes; his chef de cabinet is practical and down-to-earth. Barnier, who comes from Savoie, near the border with Switzerland, is always elegantly dressed, dapper and neat. Guersent is an altogether less subtle physical presence. He is from the south-west of France, where rugby is a religion. He used to play wing-forward in his home town of Brèves and he sports a slightly piratical goatee beard. He amuses and bemuses colleagues with lines from old French gangster films, such as “Les Tontons flingueurs”.
Whatever the differences, the mutual appreciation is clearly strong. In May 2010, barely three months after Barnier had taken office and at the height of the eurozone crisis, just after the EU had created a €440 billion bail-out fund, Guersent was involved in a horrific motorbike accident on Brussels’s inner ring-road. Both his legs were broken and he had another 50 fractures. From his hospital bed, he tendered his resignation. Barnier, however, insisted that he would wait for Guersent to come back.
It took six months. Guersent hauled himself back to the Berlaymont, the Commission’s headquarters, first in a wheelchair, then on crutches. That he walks normally now says much about his physical strength and his determination.
The negotiations over banking and single-market legislation that followed over the next three years played to other strengths. Those who were present testify to how he excelled at teasing out compromises. He combined an excellent grasp of technical details with a strong political sensitivity. The stamina helped as well with those late-night negotiations. Indeed, Guersent’s appetite for late nights and early starts is well-known. Nor would he be brow-beaten. A colleague recalls with admiration how he spoke “frankly” with Wolfgang Schäuble, Germany’s notoriously truculent finance minister.
Those who have worked with Guersent describe him as being “outwardly pro-market”– as one might expect of officials from the competition department. An ex-colleague remarks that, like Barnier, “he believes markets have to be properly regulated”, though he does not go in for “managed capitalism”.
On 2 April, the Commission announced that Guersent had been appointed as deputy director-general for competition, responsible for mergers, starting in the summer. But two weeks later the Commission announced that Guersent would instead replace Nadia Calviño as deputy director-general for internal market and services, after her appointment as director-general for budget.
The unusual sequence of appointments might raise doubts about which field Guersent favours or whether he has crossed Joaquín Almunia, the European commissioner for competition. The second decision was apparently taken without his knowledge while he was on holiday. Senior officials serve where they are told to serve, says a colleague, by way of explanation.
In Guersent’s old field of antitrust, the lawyers always grumble that though high-profile decisions can help advance an EU official’s career, those decisions may eventually be overturned by the European courts. By that time, so the cliché goes, the official has moved on.
Guersent will not have this luxury. Having pushed through, from Barnier’s cabinet, more than 30 pieces of legislation on financial reform, his next job will be to ensure that those rules work in practice.