The News
French President Emmanuel Macron has named former Brexit chief negotiator Michel Barnier as the country’s new prime minister Thursday, ending 50 days of a caretaker government and intense political wrangling after snap elections in July failed to deliver a majority for any party.
Barnier, a conservative, will now need to survive a no-confidence vote in the National Assembly, which is currently split three ways between Macron’s centrist group, the left-wing New Popular Front, and Marine Le Pen’s far-right National Rally.
SIGNALS
Barnier’s conservative stances haven’t won over the far-right
Barnier’s tough-on-immigration and curiously Euroskeptic credentials could have helped with appeasing the far-right National Rally, whose tacit support Macron needs, Politico reported. But RN leader Marine Le Pen said Thursday she wouldn’t participate in a government ”of any kind whatsoever" of Barnier’s, and that the party was “waiting to see” what his policies might be. Barnier has previously criticized the European far right for not learning the “lessons of Brexit,” but he’s not popular with the far-left either, which has so far denounced Macron’s decision to install Barnier as evidence of a stolen election and a “regime crisis,” Le Monde noted.
It’s not clear what Barnier stands for in a domestic context
As a two-time European commissioner and chief Brexit negotiator Barnier is less familiar in France — where he served as a cabinet minister and once failed to secure the conservative presidential nomination — than he is abroad, Politico noted. “Markets will probably be relieved by prospects that France could finally find a government after all…But having not seen or heard much of Barnier since Brexit we will wait and see what he stands for,” a strategist at Commerzbank AG told Bloomberg. Barnier now faces the “most delicate” of domestic tasks — an Oct. 1 deadline for France’s 2025 draft budget, at a time when France is dealing with spiraling debt.