Macron, in France’s Game of Thrones, Plays a 34-Year-Old Trump Card Named Gabriel Attal

At age 34, Gabriel Attal — who succeeds today Elisabeth Borne, 62 — is the youngest prime minister ever in French history. Until now, the record was held by Laurent Fabius, who had been appointed by President Mitterrand in 1984, at the age of 37. Mr. Attal was probably groomed for his present task last Summer, when he was transferred at President Macron’s insistence to the ministry of Education from the ministry of Budget. On the face of it, that was hardly a promotion. The ministry of Education is commonly described as “mission impossible”: it is simply too big, too bureaucratic and too centralized — and handling too many issues — to be managed effectively. However, Mr. Attal’s agenda was not really to salvage it, but rather to use it as the background of an ideological turn to the right.Indeed, his first decision as Education minister was to ban abaya at public schools. A full-length female garment that conceals the body from shoulders to ankles, abaya is all the rage among French Muslim women and girls, either out of religious zeal, peer pressure, or ethnic pride. Non-Muslims, on the contrary, reject it almost unanimously as incompatible with the French way of life. According to an Ifop poll for Charlie Hebdo, 81 percent of the French said the ban was the right decision. More significantly, self-described liberal or leftwing voters did not differ much on this issue from conservatives or right-wingers: 79 percent of the ecologists, 73 percent of the socialists, and even 58 percent of the leftwing radicals supported the ban.Mr. Attal then doubled down on other issues: “Education means hard work,” he insisted on December 5. Likewise, “teachers must be respected and obeyed,” and school programs centered again around such basics as the French language, the study of national history, and mathematics. Here again, public opinion was on the minister’s side. His own image as a tough, no-nonsense conservative was burnished.No doubt Mr. Attal is an ambitious young man. The twice-elected Mr. Macron — 2017 and 2022 — cannot run for a third mandate in 2027, under a somewhat demagogic constitutional amendment only introduced in 2008. No other centrist candidate looks charismatic enough in front of the rightwing populist, Marine Le Pen.In 2027, Mr. Attal will be 38, almost the same age as Mr. Macron when, in 2017, he was first elected president. When combined with achievement, youth can be a decisive asset. Mr. Attal has already achieved more than Mr. Macron did at the same stage. Mr. Attal was elected to the National Assembly at 28, became a junior minister of Education at 29, and the minister of the Budget at 33. Mr. Macron never ran for office prior to the 2017 presidential election and was, in 2016, made minister of the Economy at 36.The new prime minister is quite good-looking (always an asset) and eloquent. On the other hand, he is gay and in partnership with Stéphane Séjourné, a 38-year-old member of the European Parliament; but Mr. Macron, whose wife Brigitte is 25 years older than him, has faced rumors about his own love life as well. Sexual orientation may not be a sensitive factor anymore in French politics, especially if the concerned person seems to lead a stable “monogamous” life. The same may be said of religious roots. Since Mr. Attal’s mother is an Eastern Orthodox Christian, he is not Jewish under traditional Jewish law, even if his father was a Sephardic Jew from North Africa; nor does he identify religiously with Judaism. He acknowledges having been subject to antisemitic verbal abuse because of his name, and feeling close to the French Jewish community for that matter. Yet Jewishness has ceased to be problematic in French politics. Nobody seems to care that the outgoing Prime Minister had a Jewish father and publicly identifies with the Jewish community, or that the chairwoman of the National Assembly, Yaël Braun-Privet, is Jewish; even on the Far Right, a Jewish journalist and writer, Eric Zemmour, rose to prominence two years ago. Things might change, however, if Islam gets truly assertive in the country.Mr. Macron may have considered other politicians to replace Madame. Borne. The minister of the Interior, Gerald Darmanin, 40, was for a while a frontrunner. Yet he failed to garner a substantial majority last month for a new law on immigration. As for the minister of Finance, Bruno Le Maire, 54, he is not quite popular outside the business community. Clearly, Mr. Attal is Mr. Macron’s trump card in the French game of thrones.

Macron, in France’s Game of Thrones, Plays a 34-Year-Old Trump Card Named Gabriel Attal

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