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00:00Armand Georgian is with me now, he's our Europe editor. Armand, as I say this was
00:04unexpected, it was abrupt, do we know what happened? Well we do because Thierry
00:09Breton wrote a resignation letter which he's published on social media and
00:14certainly doesn't mince any words there. He says to Ursula von der Leyen, so the
00:20President of the European Commission, that she asked France to withdraw his
00:25name for personal reasons that she did not discuss with him. So the way all of
00:32this works Nadia is that if a country wants to keep their incumbent
00:37Commissioner in Brussels, they can do that without nominating new people for
00:42the post and Macron made it clear all along that he wanted to keep Thierry
00:47Breton. So it's true that it's a complete break with protocol to ask a
00:51country that had already said in this case we want to keep Breton to be asked
00:55that he should be withdrawn and this just a day before von der Leyen unveiled
01:01her new lineup. As you said the fact is that the relationship had clearly broken
01:05down, they'd had various run-ins and the one thing that you can't do as a
01:09European Commissioner is publicly criticize your boss. He questioned her
01:15credibility earlier this year when she was chosen to be the European People's
01:22Party candidate in the European election. He said that she barely had the support
01:26of her own party. That obviously did not go down well with von der Leyen. He also
01:32quite openly, was openly critical of her over the so-called Peepergate affair
01:38which was an alleged nepotism story which hit Ursula von der Leyen also just
01:45before earlier this year. So the relationship was not good and clearly
01:51things came to a head at this very critical juncture. And tell us then about
01:55his replacement, the outgoing Foreign Minister Stéphane Séjourné. Well Séjourné
02:02is a Macron loyalist. He was an advisor to President Macron when Macron was a
02:07minister of the economy and Séjourné is one of the closest confidants of
02:13Macron from the very early days of the whole movement that Macron started which
02:18was at the time called En Marche or On the Move. Then it became Republic On the
02:23Move of course. He was perhaps Macron's closest ally in in the European
02:29Parliament for five years as head of the Renew group of MEPs from 2019 until 2024
02:37and then for the last eight months he's been Foreign Minister of France. So he
02:42now goes back in a sense to a place that he knows very well, Brussels. He has
02:47of course great contacts there but crucially he is both an ally of President
02:53Macron and he's not known to be a problem for Ursula von der Leyen. So in
02:59that sense he ticks a few boxes. One box that he doesn't tick is that he's not a
03:03woman and von der Leyen has been trying to, she's been caught in this very
03:08delicate sort of negotiations with member states to have a political
03:13balance but also a gender balance in this new European Commission. Some
03:17political figures here in France said that she, sorry that Macron should have
03:22nominated a woman once it became clear that Breton was out but of course this
03:26is all going down to the wire. There wasn't much time to make a decision
03:30because as we've said this new lineup is going to be unveiled tomorrow morning so
03:36Wednesday morning in the European Parliament. We'll obviously bring you all
03:39those details Nadia. I'll be here also to kind of try to unpack all the
03:45picks that she's going to come up with including that question of gender
03:49balance as well. All right, sounds interesting. That's tomorrow morning is
03:51it? Armen Georgian for us there.