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Michel Barnier, the EU’s former Brexit negotiator now picked as prime minister to help France avoid a political crisis, has not always had kind words for his new boss, Emmanuel Macron.
“The president has governed this country, inside and overseas, in a solitary and arrogant manner,” the 73-year-old veteran centre-right politician said in a debate before Macron clinched his second electoral victory in 2022.
Macron has now chosen Barnier to do just the opposite: lean on his years of experience as a political dealmaker to forge some kind of working consensus in a French political landscape that has rarely been so fractured.
“He’s a kind of UFO in the French political sky,” said Olivier Guersent, a senior French official in the European Commission who served as Barnier’s chief of staff. “He’s difficult to define. That makes him compatible with pretty much everything.”
With Barnier’s nomination on Thursday, Macron has at least put an end to two months of limbo after a snap legislative election that delivered a hung parliament and weakened the weight of his own centrist party.
Yet the respite for Macron and Barnier could yet be brief, not least because they are hemmed in by a divided parliament that could topple the government at any time.
The nomination has also come at a price: that of handing a veto power and a strong negotiating position to Macron’s perennial rival, Marine Le Pen of the far-right Rassemblement National (RN), who had nipped other nominations in the bud.
Le Pen has said she will wait until Barnier addresses parliament before deciding whether to support his government — or at least not join the left in voting it out.
“It’s going to be extremely difficult, for reasons not linked to Barnier himself but to do with parliamentary arithmetic,” said Florence Portelli, a centre-right mayor who has known Barnier for years. “The day the RN decides playtime in the schoolyard is over, it will be over.”
If Le Pen did back a censure motion, it would be a disaster for Macron who has spent seven weeks trying to find a premier who can survive in parliament, a quest that has led many to conclude France is “ungovernable”.
The process took on an element of farce in recent days as a merry-go-round of potential candidates were given a ride by the Élysée Palace.
If Barnier were voted out and Macron struggled to find a replacement, the president could then find himself under pressure to quit to give an ungovernable country a fresh political reset.
Following his nomination, Barnier met his predecessor Gabriel Attal on the steps of the Hôtel de Matignon, the prime minister’s office, for the traditional ceremonial handover of power.
Attal, now 35, was the youngest premier in the fifth republic; Barnier is the oldest at 73. Some have already dubbed him the French Biden. Jean-Philippe Tanguy, a far-right lawmaker called him a “fossil”.
Barnier’s age was part of the attraction for Macron, since ostensibly at the end of his career, he will not be driven by presidential ambitions. “He had kind of accepted that his best card had been dealt,” said a former aide.
Instead he will be expected to use his nearly 50 years of political experience — including four stints as a minister and two terms as a European commissioner, the last five of which were spent grappling with Brexit — to build bridges in a bitterly divided parliament.
At the beginning of Brexit negotiations, few would have wagered the EU’s other 27 members would stick together as Britain negotiated its divorce, said Georg Riekeles, who served as Barnier’s chief diplomatic adviser in Brussels. But they did, with the EU largely meeting its objectives.
“A lot of that is down to his methodology, his calm and his respect for everyone.”
Barnier was meticulously well prepared for meetings, often turning up with colourful charts as an aide memoire, as he did once in an audience with Pope Benedict (the Pope announced his abdication the next day). But he also relied on highly professional staff to handle the fine details.
Riekeles, who worked with Barnier off and on for 15 years, said he showed a “very strong capacity to focus on the essentials and a capacity to listen and talk to everyone, even with people he has strong disagreements with”.
“Among the commissioners, he was the one who was most at ease working across party lines.”
“I know how to get different people around the same table, and find a compromise without anyone being humiliated,” Barnier told Paris Match in 2021, recalling how his anticlerical father and left-wing Catholic mother had very different personalities.
In Thursday’s handover, he vowed to listen to and respect “all political forces”.
A committed centrist, Barnier seemed increasingly out of kilter with his Gaullist family, recently rebranded The Republican Right.
In contrast to the technocratic Parisian elite around Macron, Barnier is proud Savoyard from the French Alps who frequently brings up his role organising the 1992 winter Olympics in Albertville.
Although not the best-known French household name, he ran for the party’s presidential nomination in 2021 on the back of his Brexit success, but came a disappointing third.
During that campaign he called for France to ignore EU and international law and impose a moratorium on immigration. Some in Brussels saw his intervention as cynical and opportunist but he told the FT last year he was trying to address the kind of public concern that drove Britain’s exit vote.
Will he be able to find any common ground with Le Pen? Barnier’s allies say he has been unambiguously against the far right throughout his political career.
In the interview with the FT, Barnier said he thought Le Pen had never dropped a deep-seated desire to take France out of the EU, even if she had toned down her Euroscepticism in recent election campaigns.
“She’s able . . . to hide what she wants to do,” he said.
Macron dissolved parliament in June in an attempt to thwart the far right’s rise. Paradoxically, Le Pen has now emerged as kingmaker within the assembly. Since the left is committed to voting down candidates for premier from the right, she can determine whether Barnier survives.
Even if she chooses not to vote against his government, backing from her RN party, which has more seats in parliament than Macron’s centrist camp, will be needed for the next urgent task at hand: negotiations in October to pass a budget for 2025 and for any legislative priorities thereafter.
Former Socialist President François Hollande summed up the anger on the left, telling reporters Barnier had “needed some kind of RN blessing” to get the job — despite praising Barnier’s personal qualities.
In the coming days Barnier will pick a cabinet, and the new prime minister will sketch out his plans in a parliamentary speech before heading into the first acid test of his tenure.
“We’ll only know if we’re out of this crisis once the budget has been voted on. That will be what determines whether we have peace, and the longevity of the prime minister,” said author and political analyst Chloé Morin.
Analysts and political insiders believe the RN will in particular press its case for electoral reform to introduce more proportionality into parliamentary polls.
Barnier’s main task will be to provide some kind of stability with a minimal agenda while addressing France’s worrying economic and financial situation.
“It’s an almost impossible task,” said his former aide Guersent. “There are no more than three people in France who can do it. He’s one of them.”
Additional reporting by Domitille Alain