Michel Barnier will unveil his government in France this week, a fortnight after the 73-year-old was nominated by Emmanuel Macron as the fifth prime minister of his presidency. It will be a government composed overwhelmingly of people from Barnier’s own party, the centre-right Republicans, and Macron’s centrist coalition. Marine Le Pen’s National Rally have ruled themselves out of contention for any posts, as have most political figures from the left.
They may be out of touch with the rest of France but they don’t care
It is a curious state of affairs that the Republican party, which won just 47 of the 577 seats in July’s parliamentary election, is now at the heart of government. But as a confidant of Macron recently told Le Figaro, the newspaper of conservative France: ‘Michel Barnier may not have a majority in the National Assembly, but he’s in tune with the country’s sociological majority.’
The left-wing coalition, which won the most seats in the elections, continue to claim that the result proves France is at heart a country that leans in that direction; economically, they may have a point, but socially France is a conservative country.
Macron’s confidant also told Le Figaro that Barnier resembled the ‘reassuring provincial notary’. That could also be construed as a put down by a patronising Parisian, one of the many who surrounds the president in the Elysee Palace.
Barnier won’t care if the Parisian elite regard him – a man from Savoie – as a yokel. ‘The Cretin from the Alps,’ and the ‘Ski Instructor’ were two of his nicknames when he served in Jacques Chirac’s government in the 1990s.
Barnier can give as good he gets. His put down of his predecessor, the Parisian Bobo Gabriel Attal, during the changing of the prime ministerial guard a fortnight ago, was exquisite.
Traditionally, the handover between the outgoing PM and their successor is brief; words of gratitude to ministers and staff, a couple of compliments about the successor and that’s it. Attal prattled on for twenty minutes, a monologue that veered between the self-pitying and the mawkish.
When finally Attal had finished, the older man regarded him with a thin smile and asked: ‘May I speak now?’ The crowd tittered.
Barnier then thanked Attal for the ‘lessons’ he had been given during the speech.
Some French journalists, the younger Parisian ones, don’t get Barnier. They describe him as cold and bland. Wiser commentators understand him better. As one said recently, Barnier has a ‘British humour’.
The 35-year-old Attal is a waif-like five foot seven inches who struggles to fill out his suit. Barnier is six foot two inches with the lithe physique of a man who looks like he has spent all of his life in the Alps.
It’s been a while since France has a physically imposing man in a position of power. Macron is five foot eight inches, his predecessor Francois Hollande is an inch shorter, and before him was Nicolas Sarkozy, so inscecure about standing five foot five inches he took to wearing stacked heels.
For Barnier, cultivating the right image will be crucial if his government is to stand any chance of succeeding.
There is plenty of scepticism about Barnier within Le Pen’s party’s
France has had enough of Paris and Parisians; it is a different country to the rest of France. In June’s European elections, Le Pen’s party triumphed in 96 of France’s 101 Departments. Only the departments of Paris and its environs (along with the Caribbean island of Martinique) resisted her blue wave that swept the country.
In his first ten days in power, Barnier has said all the things that conservative provincial France wants to hear, talking tough about immigration, insecurity and reindustrialising the country.
‘We must once again become a land of industrial production, with workers, engineers, researchers, we must once again become a land of agricultural production,’ he announced last week. He also promised, in a gentle swipe at Macron, that his ministers will come from across France. ‘There’s room for everyone,’ said Barnier. ‘Not everything will come from Paris.’ Macron’s previous governments have been stuffed with ministers from Paris.
Putting these promises into action will be the hard part, and Barnier has been warned by Le Pen and the main farming union that they have him and his government ‘under surveillance’.
There was a similar message, albeit more delicately delivered, from Barnier’s own party when they converged on Annecy last week to meet the PM. Offering Barnier their ‘very clear support’, the Republican MPs declared that ‘the French don’t want things to go on as before…we need a right-wing policy so that there is no tax increase, so that there is more security, so that there is less immigration.
In his inaugural speech, Barnier declared that there will be ‘changes and ruptures’. The left-leaning Paris elite will fiercely resist any change that threatens their dominance. In May 1968 they set out on their long march through the institutions and they now control the media, the judiciary, academia and the arts.
They may be out of touch with the rest of France but they don’t care. As far as they’re concerned, The ploucs (yokels) in the provinces are knuckle-dragging racists and cretins,
There is plenty of scepticism about Barnier within Le Pen’s party’s. A leopard doesn’t change its spots. And this leopard has for decades done Brussels’ bidding. He has also been at the heart of the Republican party’s drift to the wet centre. Nor has it gone unnoticed that it wasn’t Barnier who chose his chief of staff (Jérôme Fournel) but Alexis Kohler. He has been the Secretary-general of the Elysee Palace since 2017 and has a similar influence on Macron as Alastair Campbell had on Tony Blair during his Premiership.
Barnier’s choice of government will likely reveal a great deal about his true intentions. It will reveal to the French whether he’s really just a taller, greyer Emmanuel Macron or if he’s the prime minister who will finally govern for the ploucs and not the Paris elite.