Will new PM help Macron realise his goals?

French President Emmanuel Macron faced with falling popularity and a difficult economic situation, coupled with upcoming European Parliament elections in the summer, shuffled his cards. He has named Gabriel Attal, 34, a rising political star in France, as the prime minister, the youngest in the Fifth Republic since it began in 1958.

Elizabeth Borne, 62, the outgoing prime minister, piloted two difficult bills through parliament, one on immigration, the other on pension reform. The pension reforms was unpopular, and the other on immigration echoed the far-right sentiments of Marie Le Pen’s National Rally party. The question that is being raised is whether naming a young prime minister will help Macron tide over the remaining three years of his second presidential term.

The French Constitution does not allow a third term. Attal in his opening statement as prime minister has listed his priorities as the economy, especially jobs, making the starting of businesses easier in France, and youth. Whether he will be able to achieve the goals he has set for himself remains to be seen.

Attal has served as the education minister and he has taken up the French secularist position that Muslim girls cannot wear the traditional abaya to school. So, is he a conservative, or is he a centrist like his mentor, Macron? Macron has set out with a centrist agenda, but he has been lurching towards the right in order to stop right-wing Le Pen from making electoral headway. He may have a tough time in preventing her from making a successful bid for the presidency in 2027.

Opinion is divided about Attal among the French. While some believe that being young is an advantage and that he will be able to push through decisions that need to be taken, the others, especially the conservatives, feel that putting a young man at the head of the government will not solve the problems of the French economy, and that this is more like window-dressing.

When Macron forged ahead with his new party, now called the Renaissance Party, he showed that French politics had to break out of its traditional mould of left-right divide, and that ideological barriers had to be broken to breathe fresh life into French polity. His victory in the 2017 presidential election at the young age of 40 showed that the French saw hope in his promise.

Macron had a tough time living up to his promises because the problems facing France were quite deep-rooted, whether it was the economy, reforms like the pension system which could not be ignored, and the issue of immigration. On all the three issues, he was forced to embrace the conservative solutions. And it looked like that he was an opportunist trying to pass off as a pragmatist.

On the foreign policy front, he tried to forge greater European unity but he was not keen to adopt an aggressive stance towards Russia and its president, Vladimir Putin, like other EU leaders. He faced setbacks in western Africa with French troops forced to withdraw from places like Male. He has also adopted a pro-Palestinian stance in the Israel-Hamas war, but nothing more than that. So Macron’s vision of reinventing France as an independent and strong European power remains unfulfilled. It can only be said that after seven years as president, he is still trying hard to find a way.

If the young man, Attal, he has named as prime minister, were to succeed in mending the French economy, then Macron can hope to establish his legacy before he leaves office in 2017. But that will remain a big challenge. Critics say that it is Macron who makes all the decisions, and Attal is only  a front man.