French ministers to stay at home

There's just too much going on to risk taking summer holidays this year, at least for French government ministers.

A woman places a bouquet of flower with others to pay tribute to victims near the scene where a truck ran into a crowd at high speed killing scores and injuring more who were celebrating the Bastille Day national holiday, in Nice, France, July 15, 2016 REUTERS/Pascal Rossignol

If the security crisis in France is impacting heavily on ordinary French people, it is also disrupting the holiday plans of France’s political elite.

According to a story carried in this week’s Le Point, France’s President Francois Hollande has ordered his ministers to stay close and to forget about taking the month of August off, something that many people in France do over the summer.

Hollande himself will be attending the opening of the Olympics in Rio and will leave the country for 48 hours for that, but apart from that will take a few days in the south of France that will be broken up by a number of meetings.

He will spend most of August at the presidential residence in the estate surrounding the Chateau of Versailles.

He may also attend a post-Breixt summit with Italian and German Prime Ministers Matteo Renzi and Angela Merkel.

Environment Minister Ségolène Royal is heading north of the Arctic Circle to carry out research, but the rest will, for the large part, be stuck in Paris with none of them leaving France.

In a statement, a spokesperson for the government said that the threat from terrorism is still extreme and requires the full attention of the president.

As a result there will be two ministerial meetings on August 11 and August, which all members of the cabinet are expected to attend.
Prime Minister Manuel Valls, Interior Minister Bernard Cazeneuve, Defence Minister Jean-Yves Le Drian, Justice Minister

Jean-Jacques Urvoas and Foreign Minister Jean-Marc Ayrault will all be expected to be there