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President Emmanuel Macron has named the EU’s former Brexit negotiator Michel Barnier as France’s next prime minister in a bid to break a post-election political stalemate.
The Élysée Palace said on Thursday that Barnier had been “tasked with forming a unifying government to serve the country and the French”.
Barnier, 73, is a veteran of France’s conservative party, Les Républicains (LR).
Pressure had been building for Macron to name a prime minister two months after a snap election that ended up weakening him, with his own centrist camp losing seats, while other forces on the right and left fell short of an outright majority.
The looming deadline for the start of 2025 budget discussions in parliament next month — particularly urgent given the poor state of France’s public finances — had added to the urgency to break the deadlock.
Barnier, an LR elder statesman, declined to comment on the surge in speculation around his nomination, or on any direct exchanges with the Élysée Palace.
But he emerged as an apparently more viable candidate than Xavier Bertrand, an LR regional president who came close to clinching the job on Wednesday, people familiar with the talks said.
Barnier’s nomination is a remarkable turn of events for the EU’s former negotiator in Brexit talks with Britain, who competed to be the LR presidential candidate in France’s 2022 elections but lost out to his rival Valérie Pécresse.
She was eliminated in the first round with less than 5 per cent of the vote, and Macron was re-elected after beating Le Pen in the second round.
In that campaign, Barnier took a hard line on immigration, proposing a three- to five-year moratorium on non-EU arrivals to France and claiming it was “out of control”. The position surprised some who had known him in Brussels but could make Le Pen’s party see him more favourably.
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