Michel Barnier named as new prime minister of France

Paris: Emmanuel Macron has appointed the EU’s former Brexit negotiator, Michel Barnier, as prime minister of France, as he seeks to put an end to two months of political paralysis after a snap election.

The French president said he had tasked Barnier with forming “a unifying government in the service of the country”.

Macron shocked France by calling a snap parliamentary election in June that resulted in a hung parliament and a deeply divided political landscape.

A leftwing coalition emerged as France’s biggest political force but with not enough seats to reach an absolute majority of 289 in the national assembly. Macron’s centrist faction and the far right make up the two other major groups. Barnier’s traditional rightwing party came fourth and has 47 seats in parliament.

He replaces Gabriel Attal, who resigned on 16 July after the snap election but was kept on by Macron in a caretaker capacity.

Marine Le Pen of the far-right National Rally party said support for Barnier would depend on his policy programme.

The Socialist party leader, Olivier Faure, part of the leftwing coalition that won the highest number of seats in the election, said it was a “denial of democracy” for Macron to appoint a prime minister from the party that came fourth. “We’re entering a crisis of regime,” Faure said.

Barnier was known for almost 50 years in rightwing French politics as a centrist, liberal-minded neo-Gaullist, devoted to the European cause. But in 2021 he stunned observers by lurching to the right and hardening his stance on immigration and security as part of an unsuccessful attempt to become the presidential candidate for the right against Macron in 2022.

At the time, Barnier claimed that unregulated immigration from outside the EU was weakening France’s sense of identity. He believed the UK’s vote to leave the EU showed how dangerous it could be when divisions in society were allowed to fester. Shocking many in Brussels, he called for a French moratorium of three to five years for non-European immigrants, in which even family members joining those already in France would be stopped, and called for the country to regain legal sovereignty from EU courts.

Barnier has previously said he wanted to return to a leading role in French politics. After the post-Brexit agreement was signed with the UK, he said he realised he missed France and wanted to be “useful” in French politics. “I’ve never been a technocrat, I’ve always been a politician,” Barnier said when he tried to become the presidential candidate for Les Républicains.

At 73, Barnier becomes the oldest premier in the history of modern France. This week, Julien Odoul, an MP for Le Pen’s party, criticised him over his age, saying he was a “French Joe Biden” who often changed his views, and was “an opportunist” with “no backbone”.

Barnier has long styled himself as a dependable elder statesman – a mountaineer and hiker from the Alps, who built his career in local village politics and likes walks in ancient forests.

First elected aged 22 as a local councillor in Savoie, he entered parliament aged only 27 in 1978. He served four times as a government minister and twice as EU commissioner. His supporters point out that he has won every direct vote he has stood for since the age of 22. He is a former environment minister, and co-organiser of the 1992 Winter Olympics.