France has a new prime minister this week: Gabriel Attal, formerly education minister, was appointed by president Emmanuel Macron to replace Élisabeth Borne, who had held the position for less than twenty months, since May 2022.
Borne had been widely expected to lose her job last year, after the government narrowly survived a vote of no confidence in March. But she held on then, only to be dropped in anticipation of a poor vote for the president’s party – Renaissance, formerly Republic on the Move – in next June’s European parliament election.
Rapid turnover in the prime ministership is nothing unusual. Nicolas Sarkozy kept the same prime minister, François Fillon, for the whole of his five-year presidential term, but that was the exception. François Hollande had three prime ministers in his term; previously Jacques Chirac had four in two terms and François Mitterand seven. Now, almost two years into his second term, Macron is onto his fourth.
Attal is not a surprise selection; he was tipped beforehand as the front-runner. Nonetheless, it is a radical move. At 34 he is the youngest person ever to hold the job, just as Macron was the youngest head of state since Napoleon Bonaparte. He has African and Jewish ancestry and is also openly gay, another first. This is clearly a choice for dynamism, not appeasement: if Macron was mostly focused on soothing the feelings of far-right voters, he would have looked elsewhere.
While Attal is very unlike Borne in most respects, they share a common background on the left, in contrast to Macron’s first two prime ministers. Attal was in the Socialist Party and worked for Hollande’s government, but supported Macron’s run for president and entered parliament in 2017. He therefore continues the president’s project of having something to offer both sides: while he needs the votes of the centre-right to pass legislation (something Attal has apparently been effective at) he also needs to remind the centre-left that this is still a progressive government.
When Borne was appointed I noted that she was unlikely to be a presidential candidate herself. The same cannot be said of Attal. In the crowded field to be the replacement centrist in 2027 he will now attract plenty of attention, although his age also means that he can afford to wait if he decides that prospects will be better five or even ten years later.
The more immediate task, however, is to get the government back on track in the hope of minimising losses in the EU election. It’s been a bad couple of months, with the far right riding high after the passage of a tough new immigration law that helped shift the debate its way and exposed divisions within the government. Attal needs to address the concerns of voters without conceding ground to the extremists; it’s a difficult balancing act, as leaders in many countries can attest.
Macron faces the inevitable fate of term-limited leaders as he becomes more of a lame duck and sees the spotlight move to his potential successors. But with his choice of a new prime minister he has shown that he still has both the intent and the ability to shake things up a bit.
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