End Of The Road For ENA, France's Elite Training School?

Paris, (UrduPoint / Pakistan Point News - 25th Apr, 2019 ) :Both admired and loathed as the training ground for France's political leaders, the Ecole Nationale d'Administration will learn Thursday whether it is to be scrapped by President Emmanuel Macron for being a symbol of out-dated elitism.

Macron is the fourth president since World War II to have passed through the halls of ENA that count his predecessors Valery Giscard d'Estaing, Jacques Chirac and Francois Hollande among its illustrious graduates.

But Macron might be the last if he decides to go ahead with plans to ditch the post-graduate school in Strasbourg in a speech later Thursday intended as a response to months of anti-government protests.

ENA graduates, known as Enarques in France, form a network of influence that stretches across the top echelons of politics and business, making it a target for critics of the French establishment for decades.

But its success in producing highly-qualified public administrators, most of whom go on to hold senior jobs in ministries or public bodies, has spawned copycat institutions in other countries, including in Russia.

"The French are aware that their administration is rather well managed, competent, neutral and not politicised, and all of that we owe in part to ENA," Daniel Keller, who heads an association of former students, told AFP.

In a national address he was due to make last week but which was shelved when the Notre-Dame cathedral caught fire, Macron was to announce the scrapping of the school on the grounds it was failing in its mission.