Macron names Gabriel Attal as France's youngest, first gay PM
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Transcript
00:00 Well, France now has a new prime minister and a young one.
00:03 That's 34-year-old Gabriel Attal.
00:06 The former education minister is now the youngest prime minister in recent French history.
00:10 He's also the first one to be openly gay.
00:14 Attal is going to replace Elizabeth Borne, who resigned Monday after almost two years
00:19 in the job.
00:20 Now, that cabinet reshuffle had been in the works for some time now.
00:24 Macron's hoping to give new momentum to the last three years of his presidency that have
00:27 been rocked by a series of controversial moves over pensions and immigration.
00:32 I'm going to talk more about this now with our French politics editor, Marc Promen.
00:37 Marc, what are your thoughts on Gabriel Attal?
00:38 Tell us a bit more about who he is.
00:40 Well, he is the wonder kid of Emmanuel Macron's party, the only one who has really emerged
00:47 on the side of Emmanuel Macron.
00:50 He was a junior minister for education when he was first appointed.
00:55 And he really became known because he became the spokesperson for the government.
01:02 He was also budget minister.
01:04 It's a strategic ministry.
01:06 And for the last six months, he's been education minister, so a fairly senior position.
01:12 And now he's becoming a prime minister, the youngest, as you said.
01:17 The only parallel I can think of is back in the 1980s, the mid-1980s, when then-President
01:22 François Mitterrand appointed Laurent Fabius as his prime minister.
01:26 Fabius was 37 years old at the time, which was very young.
01:30 Gabriel Attal is 34 years old.
01:34 So he is really a minister who didn't come from other parties.
01:39 You have heavyweights in the government, finance minister Bruno Le Maire, interior minister
01:43 Gérald Darmanin, but they came from the Conservative Party.
01:47 Gabriel Attal, really, OK, he was a militant in the Socialist Party when he was even younger
01:52 than he is.
01:53 But that's it.
01:54 Nobody really knew him until Emmanuel Macron was elected and allowed him to grow.
02:00 This is an important choice because Emmanuel Macron's three previous prime ministers were
02:06 virtually unknown quantities.
02:08 Edouard Philippe, no one had heard about him.
02:11 Jean Castex, same thing.
02:13 Elisabeth Borne, yes, she was a minister during Emmanuel Macron's first mandate.
02:18 But if you ask the French people, do you know who Elisabeth Borne is?
02:21 Before she was appointed, well, the majority would have looked at you with wide eyes and
02:26 wonder who she was.
02:28 Now it's a different choice.
02:29 It's a higher profile because Emmanuel Macron probably feels he needs to rejuvenate his
02:36 mandate.
02:37 He's been struggling.
02:38 The assumption was that the reshuffle would happen only after the European Parliament
02:41 election in June.
02:42 He decided to pull the trigger.
02:43 We now have to wait.
02:45 What Gabriel Attal's government would look like, will it just be a copy and paste of
02:49 the outgoing government?
02:51 We'll have to wait for a few days.
02:53 Just a quick word on something I find which is a really interesting piece of this puzzle.
02:56 Gabriel Attal is very popular.
02:57 Polls have shown that he's one of the French people's favorite politicians.
03:00 And he's also openly gay.
03:02 I don't know if that would happen in a lot of other countries, that he would be named
03:05 and no one would make that much about it.
03:07 Well, clearly, yes.
03:08 Emmanuel Macron, probably he will not say so publicly, but he was very proud to appoint
03:14 a woman as prime minister.
03:15 It's only the second time.
03:17 And she served much longer, Elisabeth Borne, than her predecessor, Edith Crescent, back
03:23 in the 1980s.
03:24 And now he's appointing an openly gay prime minister.
03:27 This is not the reason why he appointed him.
03:30 But clearly, this was not an obstacle.
03:32 And Gabriel Attal has been very open about this, open about bullying.
03:39 He was subject to, in high school, in a recent television interview, he was very open about
03:45 it.
03:46 Obviously, he doesn't campaign about this.
03:48 He's really like your traditional politician, except that he's much younger and he's a very
03:53 good talker.
03:54 And the president feels that Elisabeth Borne had no charisma whatsoever.
04:00 She was a good technocrat, hardworking prime minister, but she didn't have any charisma.
04:06 She was very stiff.
04:07 Gabriel Attal is the total opposite.
04:11 He likes to talk.
04:13 You know, he has this kind of attitude with the people that Emmanuel Macron had when he
04:18 was first elected president.
04:21 So he's hoping that people will remember that Emmanuel Macron was a symbol of youth when
04:26 he was first elected by appointing Gabriel Attal.
04:29 But obviously, he still has the same problem as Elisabeth Borne, which is a relative majority
04:34 in the National Assembly.
04:36 This is what really hampered Elisabeth Borne's action.
04:39 And this will not change with Gabriel Attal because you will not have a coalition with
04:43 the opposition.
04:45 The opposition, be it from the far right, from the far left, or from the right, are
04:50 not there to make any nice moves for Gabriel Attal.
04:54 He will have to struggle like Elisabeth Borne to pass bills through Parliament.