By naming young political prodigy Gabriel Attal as France’s prime minister, French President Emmanuel Macron is showing what he hopes is a winning hand to beat the French far right, which is leading in opinion polls ahead of June’s European Parliament elections.
Like elsewhere in Europe, France’s far right has benefited from a cost-of-living crisis, untamed immigration and resentment toward a political class that Macron has failed to bring closer to common folk, despite promising to shake up politics in 2017.
However, Marine Le Pen also got a head start in the race by placing her own rising star, the 28-year-old Jordan Bardella, at the helm of her European campaign team, as her Rassemblement National (RN) party is running up to 10 points ahead of Macron’s centrist Renaissance party in opinion polls.
Macron’s strategists have become increasingly worried about Bardella’s popularity in the past few weeks.
A video of the young member of the European Parliament receiving rock star treatment at a food market by a crowd of adoring fans requesting selfies at the end of November last year got alarm bells ringing in Macron’s camp, a source with knowledge of the president’s thinking said.
“The president said we urgently needed someone to take on Bardella,” the source said.
Attal, 34, France’s youngest-ever prime minister, is of the same caliber — he is a smooth communicator, a skilled debater in parliament and on radio shows, and has shown an ability to seize political opportunities and win over the conservative voters Macron is after.
“It was the best card the president had up his sleeve,” IFOP pollster Jerome Fourquet said on BFM TV. “He wants to counter Bardella’s rise, especially in view of the major political event later this year, the European elections.”
As education minister, Bardella’s first move was to ban Muslim abaya dresses being worn in schools, drawing rave reviews in the increasingly influential right-wing media empire built by Vincent Bollore, the French Rupert Murdoch.
Doing well in European elections is crucial if Macron wants to remain as influential in Brussels as he has been over the past six years.
In the last European Parliament elections in 2019, his party came within a whisker of RN, giving the two camps the same number of seats and Macron’s fledgling party enough troops to weigh in on the choice of the EU’s top jobs.
Should RN do massively better than Macron’s party, it would not only be symbolically painful, but it would also reduce Macron’s influence on EU policies, since his Renew Europe grouping would also be bound to lose many Spanish and Dutch lawmakers.
France’s influence in Europe has grown under Macron, with the UK’s departure and former German chancellor Angela Merkel’s retirement leaving way for the influence of more French statist ideas on EU policymaking.
However, this election comes against a backdrop of populist gains from Slovakia to the Netherlands, testing the ability of Macron’s European family to maintain an influential role inside the European Parliament.
Some think Macron should focus more on problems at home.
“Emmanuel Macron is very busy on the international stage, but he must come back to the domestic arena and take care of people’s problems like education and housing, which are real ticking [time] bombs,” said Patrick Vignal, a lawmaker in Macron’s party.
It remains to be seen whether Attal could do as well as France’s prime minister as he did in previous roles.
Beyond his long-stated goal of bringing France back to full employment, Macron said in his New Year’s address that he wanted a “Civic Rearmament” — a restoration of authority to counter what he sees as a collapse in civility and a fragmentation of society.
“With his main reforms passed, Macron will push for policies that will be more societal and atmospheric, and probably less divisive,” Eurasia Group analyst Mujtaba Rahman said. “They will try to respond to popular anxieties about French democracy, crime and anti-social behavior.”
The anxieties follow riots in city suburbs which shocked France last summer, and a series of grim murders and Islamic militant attacks. It is not clear what Attal could do to start reversing what is a long-term development with complex causes.
Managing ministers many years his senior would also need authority and a strong will. The role of French prime minister also has the reputation of being a poisoned chalice — it is usually reserved for the fall guy whenever the French president is becoming unpopular.
That was Bardella’s ominous message to Attal on Tuesday.
“By naming Gabriel Attal, Emmanuel Macron wants to get on his [Attal’s] popularity bandwagon and soften the pain of this never-ending fin de regne,” he wrote on social media.
“He rather risks dragging the short-lived education minister down in his fall,” he wrote.
Additional reporting by Elizabeth Pineau
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