Barnier, the “old fashion” Prime Minister who wanted to stretch time

Michel Barnier, “old fashion” Prime Minister, who likes to move forward “step by step” and stretch out time, could be overthrown after three months, the most ephemeral lease in the V^e republic. “I don’t know if this will happen”, but “I am ready for it”, he repeats, lucid about the pincers which surround him: without an absolute majority in the National Assembly and forced to present a budget of savings to cover a heavy deficit.

He also knows that the left, which won the legislative elections in a fractured Assembly, promised upon its arrival to censor this right-wing Prime Minister, and that the National Rally, the first group in the Assembly, placed him as soon as the departure “under surveillance”. Not to mention his partners from the right and the center who also give him a hard time.

Michel Barnier, 73, is the oldest head of government in the V^e Republic. His style embodies the old world and he cultivates it, as opposed to the “new world” of the Macronists. Faced with the heckling of deputies on Tuesday, he regretted that the National Assembly had “changed a lot”. And, in this “electric” context, he “is the incarnation of stability”, praises one of his ministers.

The former minister of Jacques Chirac and Nicolas Sarkozy likes to present himself as “a mountain man” who takes “one step after another”, “without bragging”, when his predecessor, the youngest Prime Minister of the V^e République, Gabriel Attal, communicated a lot.

At the risk of having an “old fashion reading” of politics, deplores a former Macronist minister, who sometimes notes “contempt” on the part of the tenant of Matignon with regard to the presidential camp, coupled with an old and “bipartisan” of the Assembly. “In truth, Barnier, it’s a huge disappointment,” adds the same elected official, who describes him as “resentful” when he mocks Gabriel Attal’s “somewhat empty” office or wants to review the results of his predecessors.

This man of “habits”, an early bedhead and “methodical”, who himself admits to not being a “joke”, recently praised “endurance and tenacity” in Limoges in front of industrialists.

Michel Barnier wants to “take the time” to master it better. It took him two painful weeks to form his government, caught between the outbidding of the right, the Macronist dissensions and the refusal of the left.

“This is what he did (when he was the EU negotiator) on Brexit: he stretched the time and the procedures to the end,” notes a ministerial advisor. Then, when everything seems stuck, he speeds up. He puts his resignation in the balance in front of his partners summoned to Matignon. And, faced with the presidential ambitions of some, including the right, he brings out the card of a “common candidate” for 2027.

When Marine Le Pen issues an ultimatum to obtain new concessions on the budget, he affirms that he is “not in this state of mind”, before giving in almost one by one to his demands in the home stretch.

But time ended up stopping in the face of overbidding. “I didn’t believe she would dare,” he said Monday after a telephone conversation with the leader of the RN deputies, determined to vote for censure despite her actions. Marine Le Pen has “a personal agenda”, asserts from the Prime Minister’s entourage, in an allusion to the trial of RN assistants in the European Parliament, where the RN leader risks ineligibility.

The former European commissioner, who successfully negotiated Brexit, therefore risks failing this time. However, he recently praised his “experience” in dealing with British Europhobes – “We have (Nigel) Farages here too”.

The former local elected official from Savoie now hopes that we keep the image of him as “an honest man, patriotic and European, who serves his country with dignity” and especially not the “Parisian microcosm”. “I don’t care about the gold of the Republic,” he said Tuesday evening on television.