PARIS — Emmanuel Macron never seemed to take his own presidential platform seriously until he hired Jean Pisani-Ferry to coordinate his economic program.

Long accused by rivals from both left and right of being too vague about his plans, the French presidential upstart and former economy minister had even sounded flippant, deriding the traditional ultra-detailed programs that candidates develop only to forget about them when elected. What mattered according to Macron was the core of “big ideas” that would create the presidential narrative he felt the French need to hear.

Then in January, Pisani-Ferry, an unassuming 65-year-old economist with a long track record in think tanks and academia, was put in charge of economic policy and the overall coherence of Macron’s program.

By early March, the presidential favorite had published a 150-page platform covering a wide range of topics, from sports to religion and from housing to fisheries. But the most important point was that it came together with a fiscal framework detailing the financial consequences of the proposed reforms.

It was easy to spot Pisani-Ferry’s fingerprints all over the platform, including in a no-nonsense approach to fiscal reality coupled with a determination to comply with the EU-imposed public deficit limit. Macron now has the most detailed program in the presidential campaign — and the only one complying with the Brussels rule capping budget deficits at 3 percent of gross domestic product.

In an interview with POLITICO, Pisani-Ferry was, however, quick to insist that the platform was a “team job” and give credit to others.

Pisani-Ferry’s political and personal heritage is closely linked to the development of the European Union.

He said he had decided to get involved in Macron's campaign because “we don’t live in ordinary times.” He regards this year’s presidential election as the moment when rational choices must be articulated to address “citizen anger,” illustrated by the rise of far-right National Front. And Pisani-Ferry sees Macron as the man who will tackle the challenge.

Opinion polls suggest Macron will at least get the chance to do so. Three weeks before the election's first round on April 23, most surveys see him coming in first or second, then going on to defeat National Front leader Marine Le Pen in the run-off two weeks later.

Elder statesman

Sometimes known simply as "JPF," Pisani-Ferry was not the first economist to join the Macron campaign. The team includes Marc Ferracci, a close friend of the candidate from their student days and now one of France’s most influential labor economists. Ferracci is in charge of overseeing crucial reforms of the job market and welfare system. Macron can also count on Philippe Martin, a professor of economics at Sciences Po university and his former adviser at the economy ministry. But Pisani-Ferry brings seniority and an international reputation to the team of 30- or 40-something Macron advisers.

Pisani-Ferry is best known outside France as the founder in 2005 of the Brussels-based think tank Bruegel, which became one of Europe’s most influential at the onset of the global financial crisis. He joined the Macron campaign after spending the last four years as head of France Stratégie, the French government’s own public-policy research body.

Pisani-Ferry’s political and personal heritage is closely linked to the development of the European Union. He is the son of Edgard Pisani, a long-serving agriculture minister under president Charles de Gaulle who oversaw the birth of Europe’s “common market” in the 1960s. In the early 1980s, Pisani, who died last year at 98, was appointed a European Commissioner by the then Socialist President François Mitterrand.

The "Ferry" comes from his mother, a descendant of 19th-century statesman Jules Ferry, who was both the creator of the modern French non-confessional system of public education and the architect of the country's colonial expansion.

An engineer by training, Pisani-Ferry took a graduate course in economics and ended up joining the CEPII economic research center, which he headed in the early 1990s. He then became a senior adviser to then-finance minister Dominique Strauss-Kahn, before moving on to chair the French government’s Council of Economic Analysis, an advisory body to the prime minister.

He said he decided to found Bruegel when he and a colleague concluded that “there was a gap at the European level between thinking and action.” They wanted the think tank to be policy-oriented.

'Sheer will'

Bruegel was founded without EU funding, Pisani-Ferry recalled, but with money he had raised from 11 member states.

“I saw him arrive in London in the early 2002 or 2003, his little attaché case in hand, and he thought he could raise funds from the U.K. Treasury,” said a former French diplomat. “No one thought he would pull it off. And he did. He built Bruegel out of sheer will.”

Jean-Claude Trichet, the former European Central Bank president who became the chairman of Bruegel’s board of directors in 2012, said he admired how fast Pisani-Ferry established the think tank's international reputation.

“He is one of the very few scholars who has a 360-degree view of the world, knows about the political process and how things work in many different foreign countries,” Trichet added.

That doesn't mean Trichet liked everything that came out of Bruegel. During his ECB years, he said, he sometimes read Bruegel papers with which he disagreed.

Nordic model

Hit by a nine-year term limit he himself had put into Bruegel’s statute, Pisani-Ferry was then appointed four years ago at the helm of France Stratégie by President François Hollande ‘s socialist government.

He transformed it into an influential think tank, publishing papers designed to help the government explain its reforms, but also expressing diverging views — for example by making clear that change could and should have come faster, and been bolder.

Pisani-Ferry says he is there to propose ideas to Macron and make sure they all fit into a larger framework, but he insists that political decisions belong to the candidate himself.

Pascal Lamy, the former European Commissioner and World Trade Organization director-general, said that Pisani-Ferry was a long-time, fully signed-up member of the “perpetual minority” within the French left whose attachment to the welfare state and social protections goes hand in hand with a rigorous, market-oriented economic mantra.

“Call it the Nordic model,” Lamy said. “It has been defended by the long-suffering minority of the Socialist Party which has often been derided and marginalized by the majority.” That group includes Lamy’s mentor Jacques Delors, the former French finance minister and European Commission president who presided over the creation of the European single market and laid the groundwork for monetary union.

Along with the traditional social democratic vision of combining a welfare state and market-based economy, Pisani-Ferry brings the method that he has long said was lacking in French political debate. He says reform is hard in France because of the difficulty in agreeing on a common diagnosis of the country’s problems — which he says has to be the starting point.

Pisani-Ferry says he is there to propose ideas to Macron and make sure they all fit into a larger framework, but he insists that political decisions belong to the candidate himself. Many saw in Macron's refusal to end the 35-hour week or repeal France's wealth tax, as he'd hinted he would do, the sign of his reluctance to kill two socialist sacred cows. Both controversial measures will be reformed to dampen their most absurd effects, but the symbols will remain untouched.

There have been rumors that Pisani-Ferry might move on to a cabinet position — he looks predestined for the finance or economy ministry. But one of his longtime friends doubts that he’d be interested. “I’m not sure he strives to become a politician,” the friend said. “I see him keeping his role as an adviser, an intellectual talking to the prince. He needs time to think and write, and active politics doesn’t allow you that luxury.”