A protester wearing a mask with the face of France’s President Emmanuel Macron holds a marionette representing Prime Minister Michel Barnier during a protest in Paris against the government. – AFP
French President Emmanuel Macron has named a new government led by Prime Minister Michel Barnier, marked by a shift to the right 11 weeks after an inconclusive parliamentary election. The first major task for Barnier, appointed just over two weeks ago, will be to submit a 2025 budget plan addressing France’s financial situation, which the prime minister this week called “very serious”. Conservative Barnier is best-known internationally for leading the European Union’s Brexit negotiations with the UK. More recently, he has had the difficult job of submitting a cabinet for Macron’s approval that has the best chance of surviving a no-confidence motion in parliament. Opposition politicians from the left have already announced that they will challenge his government with a confidence motion. In the July election, a left-wing bloc called the New Popular Front (NFP) won the most parliamentary seats of any political bloc, but not enough to get an overall majority. Macron argued that the left would be unable to muster enough support to form a government that would not immediately be brought down in parliament. He turned instead to Barnier to lead a government drawing mostly on parliamentary support from Macron’s allies, from the conservative Republicans (LR) and the centrists groups, while counting on a neutral stance from the far-right. Marine Le Pen’s far-right National Rally (RN) had given tacit support to Barnier’s premiership, but reserved the right to back out at any point if its concerns over immigration, security and other issues were not met. Among the new faces in key cabinet posts are Foreign Minister Jean-Noel Barrot, a centrist, and conservative Bruno Retailleau at the interior ministry, whose portfolio covers immigration. Antoine Armand, who is 33 and a graduate of France’s top administration school, will serve as finance minister and Jean-Noel Barrot will become foreign minister in a government composed largely of centrist and conservative parties, Alexis Kohler said from the Elysee Palace late yesterday. Sebastien Lecornu will stay on as defence minister, he added. There are questions over how stable the new government will prove to be, and whether it will manage to push reform measures through parliament, analysts say, with the adoption of the 2025 budget its first, difficult challenge. The job of submitting a budget plan to parliament next month falls to Armand, the new finance minister. He has previously served as head of parliament’s economic affairs commission. “The centrist government is de facto a minority administration,” Eurointelligence analysts said in a note. Its ministers “will not only have to agree amongst each other but also will need votes from opposition parties for its bills to pass in the assembly. This means offering even more concessions and manoeuvring”. “I’m angry to see a government that looks set to recycle all the election losers,” Mathilde Panot, who leads the hard-left LFI group of lawmakers, told TF1 television. Even before the announcement, thousands of people with left-leaning sympathies took to the streets in Paris and the southern port city of Marseille yesterday to protest. They were object to a cabinet they say does not reflect the outcome of the parliamentary election.
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