France’s Age-Challenged Premier Promises To Whittle Down Bureaucracy

Give the young man credit for trying. France’s fresh-faced new prime minister, Gabriel Attal, 34 years young, vowed in his first major speech to the National Assembly on Tuesday to take an ax to France’s stultifying bureaucracy. The reasons for doing so are grounded in politics — the French state employs more than a fifth of the adult population, so no amount of youthful zeal is likely to tear down in one fell swoop a culture of red tape. Mr. Attal, though, needs to prove his mettle on the national stage, and fast. One pressing problem: an army of angry French farmers who are bent on driving their tractors into the heart of Paris to make their various beefs — including with France’s bloated bureaucracy — clear to the powers-that-etre at Paris. Another has to do with an older and more experienced woman about town, named Marine Le Pen. Revenons à nos moutons — let’s get back to our sheep, as the French expression goes. It draws on France’s centuries of agricultural traditions. Blaming burdensome regulations has been at the heart of farmers’ rage all over Europe but most pointedly in France, where farmers have showered some government offices with animal manure and threatened to stop traffic inside Paris with tractors and bales of hay. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is a big factor behind the higher operating costs that have brought farmers’ anger to a fever pitch in the EU’s top agricultural power. According to the AP, a ton of French wheat that sold for $430 before the war now commands less than half of that price. Red tape is costly too. In his “general politics” speech on Tuesday, Mr. Attal told French lawmakers: “It has been estimated that every year we lose 60 billion euros because of regulatory complexities in our daily lives.”So he pledged what he called, in French, a “de-bureaucratization” that will ostensibly help farmers and the middle class. That will be a tough sell in a country where the suggestion of minor labor reform stirs talk of manning the barricades. “Throughout our country, French people tell me how regulation oppresses them, restricts them, prevents them from doing things and moving forward,” Mr. Attal stated. “When an investor wants to set up a project in Europe, one thing is obvious: In France, it takes an average of 17 months to get it going. In Germany, it’s half that. This can’t go on.”The timing of the speech, in which Mr. Attal vowed to make more adjustments to agricultural regulations, is standard practice for any newly appointed prime minister in France — it is an opportunity to outline his political vision for the coming years. Unusually, though, the speech did not close with a confidence vote.That omission speaks, at least in part, to the power of a rising star in the French political universe: Ms. Le Pen of the National Rally party. A new Le Figaro poll suggests that whatever bounce in the ratings President Macron had hoped for by appointing the young and openly gay Mr. Attal to the Hôtel de Matignon — the official residence of the French prime minister — he just isn’t getting it. According to the poll, 40 percent of those surveyed said they wished to see Ms. Le Pen “play an important role in the months and years ahead.” The figure placed Ms. Le Pen in the leading position among France’s “top ten political personalities.” The survey suggested that it is among French people who consider themselves on the left and the far left of the political spectrum that Ms. Le Pen is making headway this month. That could prove unsettling for Team Macron, even if the next presidential election in France is a long way away.Mr. Macron’s liberal Renaissance party lacks a parliamentary majority. Plus, European parliamentary elections are only a few months away. Ms. Le Pen and the chairman of the National Rally, 28-year-old Jordan Bardella, are already jockeying dans les coulisses — in the wings — for a conservative sweep in that contest that could deliver a further blow to Mr. Macron’s credibility. In that endeavor, they will in the coming weeks and months be capitalizing on the French farmers’ discontent that Mr. Attal, by dint of his inexperience, risks turning into a political fireball. At least his boss is in charge of the water cannons — for now, anyway.

France’s Age-Challenged Premier Promises To Whittle Down Bureaucracy

France’s Age-Challenged Premier Promises To Whittle Down Bureaucracy

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