French military chief resigns after row with Macron

PARIS: France’s top military chief resigned late on Wednesday after a war of words with Emmanuel Macron over budget cuts that tested the new president’s authority.

The row between Macron and General Pierre de Villiers erupted last week when the chief of staff told a parliamentary committee he would not allow the armed forces to be “screwed” by the government’s plans to slash 850 million euros ($980 million) from this year’s defence budget.

Macron, 39, slapped down the 60-year-old five-star general in front of army chiefs at their annual summer party last week, saying “I am the boss” and that he deeply regretted the budget dispute had been dragged into the “public sphere”.

De Villiers, a widely respected figure who had been in the job for three years and was popular with the rank and file, said he had no choice but to stand down.

“I no longer feel able to ensure the sustainability of the model of the armed forces that I think is necessary to guarantee the protection of France and the French people,” he said in a statement.

On Wednesday, Macron stood by his handling of the disagreement, telling France 2 television that de Villiers was a “fine soldier” it was “not the role” of the chief of staff to question the budget.

The president also reiterated his promise to raise the defence budget again in 2018. “I’m behind our troops,” he assured. He named General Francois Lecointre, a 55-year-old hero of the Balkans wars, as de Villiers’s replacement.

Seen as one of the finest officers of his generation, de Villiers’s departure triggered howls of indignation from the opposition. The leader of the hard-left France Unbowed, Jean-Luc Melenchon, called it an “enormous mistake” on Macron’s part.

De Villiers’s leaked remarks about the budget were made behind closed doors to a committee that expected him to “respond frankly”, Melenchon argued. Far-right leader Marine Le Pen, whom Macron beat in the presidential run-off election, claimed de Villiers’s resignation showed “the very serious abuses and worrying limits” of Macron’s leadership.

Damien Abad, a lawmaker from the conservatives Republicans, also took issue with what he termed Macron’s “excessive authoritarianism”.

De Villiers had repeatedly complained that the military was overstretched and said he saw it as his duty to inform politicians. In a Facebook “letter to a young recruit” last week, he wrote: “As everyone has their shortcomings, no one should be blindly followed.”

Macron’s defence cuts -- part of a 4.5-billion-euro reduction in spending aimed at reducing France’s budget deficit -- were viewed by the military as a betrayal after his strong show of support for the armed forces during his first weeks in office.

Hours after being inaugurated Macron visited a hospital treating injured soldiers and his maiden foreign trip as leader took him to Mali to meet French troops engaged in counter-terrorism operations.

On Thursday he is set to visit an air base in the southwestern city of Istres, addressing the military for the first time since de Villiers’ departure, with Lecointre accompanying him.