Gabriel Attal is appointed as France’s next prime minister, marking Emmanuel Macron’s effort to revitalize his presidency through a new government.
At 34, he is the youngest PM in modern French history, outranking even Socialist Laurent Fabius who was 37 when he was appointed by François Mitterrand in 1984.
Mr Attal replaces Élisabeth Borne, who resigned after 20 months in office. Throughout that time she struggled with a lack of a majority in parliament.
Gabriel Attal, who is currently education minister, certainly makes an eye-catching appointment. He will now have the task of leading the French government into important European Parliament elections in June.
His rise has been rapid. Ten years ago he was an obscure adviser in the health ministry and a card-carrying member of the Socialists.
He will also be the first openly gay occupant of Hôtel Matignon. He has a civil partnership with another Macron whizz-kid, the MEP Stéphane Sejourné.
In 2018, Gabriel Attal was appointed deputy minister of the education department.
But given the difficulties of the president’s second term – and the growing challenge from the nationalist right – is “eye-catching” alone going to cut it? Handsome, youthful, charming, popular, and influential, Mr Attal certainly comes to office trailing clouds of glory – much, let it be said, like his mentor and role model the president himself.
But like many go-getters of his generation, he was inspired by Emmanuel Macron’s idea of breaking apart the old left-right divide and re-writing the codes of French politics.
In the wake of Macron’s 2017 election, Mr Attal became a member of parliament, and it was there that his brilliance as a debater – easily the best of the neophyte Macronite intake – brought him to the president’s attention.
At 29, he became the youngest-ever minister in the Fifth Republic with a junior post in education; from 2020 he was a government spokesman and his face began to register with the voters; after President Macron’s re-election, he was briefly budget minister and then took over at education last July.
It was in this post that Mr Attal confirmed to the president that he has what it takes, acting with no-nonsense determination to end September’s row over Muslim abaya robes by simply banning them in schools.
He led a campaign against bullying – he was a victim, he says – at the elite École alsacienne in Paris, and took on the education establishment with his proposal to experiment with school uniforms.
And, all the while, he managed to buck the normal trends by becoming popular among the public.
Polls show that he is by far the most admired member of the Macron government – competing at the same level as the president’s main enemy, the nationalist Marine Le Pen and her youthful colleague Jordan Bardella. And there, of course, is the heart of it.
By drawing Gabriel Attal from his pack of ministers, Mr Macron is using an ace to outplay the queen and her jack. But will it work? The drawn-out process of naming him – everyone knew a reshuffle was coming but it took forever – shows that if President Macron is well aware of the weakness of his current position, he has also been in deep uncertainty over how to address it.
Even opposition figures recognize that he is a class act. He is respected and liked in the National Assembly.
But there are also questions about what he stands for. The suspicion for many is that he is all smiles and verbiage, much like the man to whom he owes his career.
Nominated by the president, he is the prodigy’s prodigy. However, if he turns out to be merely Macron’s replica, the wonder may end up being illusory.
