Michel Barnier said on Thursday evening, when he took office, that he wanted to work as a priority on education, security, immigration, work and purchasing power.
AFP
New French Prime Minister Michel Barnier, a former European Commissioner and former right-wing minister, promised “changes and ruptures” on Thursday after being appointed by President Emmanuel Macron in the hope that he would manage to lead France out of its political impasse.
“It will be a question of responding, as much as we can, to the challenges, the anger, the suffering, the feeling of abandonment, of injustice,” Michel Barnier declared when he took office, citing among his priorities education, security, immigration, work and purchasing power. He also promised to “tell the truth” about France’s “financial and ecological debt.”
Excellent negotiator
After sixty days of suspense following the July legislative elections, which resulted in an ultra-fragmented National Assembly, the oldest Prime Minister of the Fifth Republice Republic – since 1958 –, aged 73, succeeded Gabriel Attal, 35, who was the youngest.
With solid experience in France and Brussels, Michel Barnier is known as a good mediator: he was the EU negotiator when the United Kingdom left the continental bloc. Before that, he was a minister on several occasions since 1993, notably under the presidencies of Jacques Chirac and Nicolas Sarkozy.
After endless weeks of consultations and procrastination, Emmanuel Macron “tasked him with forming a unifying government”, having “ensured that the Prime Minister and the future government would meet the conditions to be as stable as possible and give themselves the chance to unite as broadly as possible”, declared the presidency.
Already contested on the left
But the new Prime Minister, already contested by the left, will have to use all his diplomatic skills to form a government capable of escaping parliamentary censure and putting an end to the most serious political crisis of the Fifth Republic.e Republic.
A task that seems like an impossible mission, as no viable coalition has emerged so far. The Assembly resulting from the July legislative elections – convened after the dissolution of the Lower House decided by the Head of State, in the wake of a rout of his majority in the European elections – is fragmented into three blocs: left, centre right and far right.
“No legitimacy”
His appointment provoked the wrath of the left, the main force in the Assembly, which demanded the post of head of government.
Like its other partners in the left-wing New Popular Front (NFP) alliance, the socialist group in the Assembly announced that it would censure the Barnier government, which “has neither political nor republican legitimacy.”
“We are entering a crisis of the regime,” said the leader of the socialists, Olivier Faure, on X, denouncing a “democratic denial at its peak,” while the right-wing party Les Républicains, of which Michel Barnier is a member, came in fourth place in the legislative elections.
“Stolen election”
“The election was stolen from the French,” also reacted the leader of the radical left, Jean-Luc Mélenchon. “He is the personality closest to the positions” of the National Rally (RN), the far-right party, he judged.
For several weeks now, the RN, which emerged groggy in July from the legislative elections, which it had dreamed of being the big winner a month earlier after its triumph in the European elections in June, seems to have transformed into a kingmaker.
The Republican blockade in the legislative elections, which confirmed the failure of the extreme right, which came in third place after the left and the centre right, now seems like a distant memory.
Choice dictated by the extreme right?
Thanks to the presidential procrastination over the post of head of government – Emmanuel Macron insisting on a Prime Minister who does not immediately succumb to a motion of censure and who does not unravel his reforms, particularly that of pensions, to which the left was hostile – the RN has transformed itself into an “arbiter of elegance”, according to a pillar of the majority.
The leader of the RN, Marine Le Pen, thus torpedoed the nomination of another LR candidate, l’ex-ministre Xavier Bertrandhis historic political adversary in the north of France.
Regarding Michel Barnier, who in 2022 advocated a three to five year “moratorium” on immigration, the far right indicated that it would judge his general policy speech on its merits, before deciding on a possible censure of his government.
On the left, Michel Barnier’s opposition to the decriminalisation of homosexuality in 1981, when he was a young MP, sparked the start of a controversy on Thursday.
A government is needed quickly
Time is now running out to form a new government, with the 2025 budget due to be tabled in Parliament on 1is October at the latest. The exercise promises to be complex, as the French public deficit is expected to widen further to 5.6% of GDP this year, after reaching 5.5% of GDP in 2023, earning Paris an excessive deficit procedure by the European Commission.
In Europe, German Chancellor Olaf Scholz congratulated Michel Barnier, wishing him “strength and success for the tasks ahead.”
The head of the Italian government, Giorgia Meloni, from the far right, praised Michel Barnier’s “great political experience”, “added value for the common work to be accomplished at European level”.
(afp)
