WHEN François Hollande, the French president, boldly appointed Manuel Valls, a reformist centre-left moderate, as his new prime minister on March 31st, he promised a fresh, lean “combat government”. Yet the team unveiled today by Mr Valls is odd. Most leading ministers kept their jobs. There were few newcomers. And the incoming finance minister, Michel Sapin, who replaces Pierre Moscovici, will share the building with Arnaud Montebourg, the meddling industry minister, who not only keeps that title but adds responsibility for “the economy” too. Those who stay in their posts include Laurent Fabius, as foreign minister, and Jean-Yves Le Drian at defence. Both have done a solid job and are among the more respected members of the outgoing government. By contrast, Christiane Taubira, the justice minister, keeps her post despite claiming recently not to know about a judicial wiretap placed on a telephone belonging to Nicolas Sarkozy, a former centre-right president, by brandishing papers that informed her cabinet of it.

The most notable newcomer is Ségolène Royal, Mr Hollande’s former partner and mother of their four children, who was also the Socialists’ defeated presidential candidate in 2007. A popular figure among grass-roots Socialists, she takes over a big environment and energy portfolio. Her presence will doubtless also delight the followers of the soap opera that has been the president’s life in recent months.

Arguably the most important appointment is Mr Sapin’s move to finance, a return to a post he held between 1992 and 1993 under François Mitterrand. Like Mr Le Drian, he is an old and trusted friend of Mr Hollande’s, but has had a disappointing time as labour minister trying to defend the president’s failed promise to bring down unemployment by the end of 2013. In a reorganised finance ministry, he will also be in charge of the budget, a job that used to be done by Bernard Cazeneuve, who instead goes to the interior ministry.

Mr Sapin’s chief task in the next couple of weeks will be defending France’s budget plans to the European Commission. Mr Hollande hinted this week that France might try to push for yet another delay in order to bring its budget deficit down to 3%, which it is supposed to do by 2015. Figures out this week showed that fiscal consolidation is happening more slowly than the government had planned, with the deficit down to only 4.3% in 2013, compared with a promised target of 4.1%. But Brussels is in no mood to give in to France again.

Mr Hollande has promised to find €50 billion ($69 billion) of budget savings in 2015-2017, as well as €10 billion of new cuts in payroll taxes on businesses. He recently mentioned a further unspecified reduction in social charges paid by employees, but it is not clear where all these cuts will come from. Squaring that circle will be only one of Mr Sapin’s challenges. The other will be working with Mr Montebourg.

A one-time lawyer, and author of a book arguing for “deglobalisation”, Mr Montebourg veers between genuinely constructive efforts to showcase French high-tech industrial innovation and blatant interference in corporate decision-making. His expanded empire, just like the reappointment of Ms Taubira, is doubtless an effort by Mr Valls to appease the distrustful left wing of his party, especially after the Greens refused to join it. Another left-winger, Benoît Hamon, was promoted to education. And Mr Valls could scarcely afford to have Mr Montebourg sniping at him from the outside. But his new role will make for yet more stormy and contradictory messages about the pace and direction of economic policy in France.