In the end, Emmanuel Macron decided to force the issue and appointed a member of the People’s Party as prime minister: former minister and former European Commissioner Michel Barnier. The choice infuriated the left-wing Popular Front, winner of the election, which called it a “stolen election”. The French president appointed the 73-year-old conservative 60 days after legislative elections that resulted in a National Assembly without a clear majority. He will be the oldest prime minister of the Fifth Republic and will succeed the youngest, Gabriel Attal, who is 35.
With a solid political background in France and Brussels, Barnier has a reputation as a good mediator and was the European Union’s chief Brexit negotiator when the United Kingdom left the bloc. Previously, he served as a minister several times since 1993, notably under the presidencies of Jacques Chirac and Nicolas Sarkozy. He will now have to use all his diplomatic skills to form a government capable of escaping parliamentary no-confidence and ending the country’s most serious political crisis in the last 50 years. A task that seems like an impossible mission, given that no coalition capable of sustaining a government has yet emerged.
The Assembly resulting from the legislative elections in July is fragmented into three blocs: the left, the center-right and the far right. “Michel Barnier does not come from the New Popular Front that won the elections, but from a party that received the least votes. The election was stolen,” thundered the leader of La France Insoumise, Jean-Luc Mélenchon. For the representative of the main party of the Front, “a denial of democracy is underway”: “I call for the most massive mobilization possible for the demonstration on October 7,” he continued, calling his supporters to the streets.
The Rassemblement National will “judge” on the basis of the “general political discourse,” wrote Jordan Bardella, leader with Marine Le Pen of the radical right formation, the Assembly’s largest party, on X. “After an interminable wait, unworthy of a great democracy, we take note of the nomination,” reads the post, which states that “the 11 million voters of Rn deserve respect: this is our first request.”
Macron’s gamble of calling snap parliamentary elections in June backfired, with his centrist coalition losing dozens of seats and no party winning an absolute majority. The French still denied the RN victory, and thanks in part to runoffs, the left-wing New Popular Front alliance came out on top, but Macron ruled out asking them to form a government after the other parties said they would immediately reject him. The left alone does not have enough votes to reject Barnier, but it could call for street protests.
