Appointed this Thursday, September 5, to Matignon, the old LR veteran, a party which won 5.41% of the vote in the legislative elections, will have to navigate between Emmanuel Macron and Marine Le Pen, to whom he owes his appointment.
The dissolution engine launched by Emmanuel Macron has finally crash-landed, just sixty days after the second round of the legislative elections. Michel Barnier, an old hand at the moribund LR party, was appointed Prime Minister this Thursday, September 5 at lunchtime and arrived at Matignon for a transfer of power with Gabriel Attal before dinner. Every minute in power counts, especially when your main attraction is that Marine Le Pen, consulted in advance, said she “ready to wait” your first speech before deciding whether the National Rally would vote for your dismissal. This period of indulgence – it is difficult to use the accepted term of grace period – is off to a flying start, since that very morning, RN MP Jean-Philippe Tanguy kindly described Michel Barnier as “fossilized from political life”, complaining on France Inter that the presidential camp “made of Jurassic Park permanently”.
In fact, the title of the film that comes to mind in this political sequence would rather be One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, where all patients simulate a belonging that does not belong to them. Arriving third in 2021 in the primary of a party that only won 5.41% of the votes in the last legislative elections, Michel Barnier is now described as “great negotiator”, of “major local elected official”, of “great diplomat.” A lot of greatness for a position that will mainly consist of not upsetting either Le Pen or Macron, and of reconciling Bercy and Brussels in a position contrary to that which the new Prime Minister had during the Brexit negotiations: all the assets are with the others.
Barely arrived, the new Prime Minister was trolled by the old one, Gabriel Attal listing all the projects he would have implemented if he had not been thanked by a poorly planned cabal at the Elysée, finishing his sentences on the bills mentioned by a “it’s on your desk” worthy of Molière. Terribly boring in his books and in the televised debate that had sunk him during the LR primary, Michel Barnier pleasantly surprised on the form, borrowing from these dear British a deadpan humor that allowed him to gently but firmly put his young predecessor back in his place. On the substance, on the other hand, he did not wait to announce a «rupture» and chant the RN’s hobbyhorses which are now his own, the fight against immigration, against insecurity and against punitive ecology (renamed “ecological debt”), balanced by “school and public services”, all while severely criticizing not the Attal method of governance, but rather the Macron method. Nicknamed in his camp “Major Thompson”, after the protagonist of Pierre Daninos, the alert old man who explains in his Notebooks what “power slips out of your hands as soon as you seize it,” Will Michel Barnier last longer than Gabriel Attal at Matignon? Eight months suddenly seem like a very long period, one would be tempted this time to say: a period of grace.
