Michel Barnier emerges as contender to be French prime minister

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The EU’s former Brexit negotiator Michel Barnier has emerged as one of the contenders to be France’s next prime minister, as President Emmanuel Macron seeks to form a new government and end a post-election political stalemate

Barnier, 73, is a veteran of the French conservative party Les Républicains (LR), one of the forces Macron has been flirting with to find support in the country’s fractured lower house of parliament and name a cabinet that will not fall at the first hurdle or undo his past reforms.

Pressure is building for Macron to name a prime minister two months after a snap election that ended up weakening his hand, with his own centrist camp losing seats while other forces on the right and left fell short of an outright majority too. 

Several contenders drawn from the civil service and from parties of left and right have emerged in recent weeks only to be eclipsed by the attempts of rival political movements to topple each other.

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 — is only adding to the need 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 on Thursday 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.

The far-right Rassemblement National (RN) party of Marine Le Pen, with a large share of seats in France’s parliament, has become a de facto kingmaker in the process and ultimately killed off the option of Bertrand, a long-time opponent of the RN in the far-right’s northern fiefdom, the people added. 

“There would be a real logic to choosing Xavier Bertrand, or if not, Michel Barnier,” senior LR politician Jean-François Copé told RTL radio on Thursday, arguing that despite a leftwing alliance getting the highest number of seats in parliament, rightwing parties garnered a higher share of the popular vote. 

A Barnier nomination would be 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. 

On Thursday RN figureheads had harsh words for Barnier but did not immediately rule out his appointment.

Jean-Philippe Tanguy, an RN MP who works on economic policy, said Barnier represented a “fossilised” old world, accusing the Élysée Palace of “going down the Jurassic Park” road in trying to return to figures of France’s past and the pre-Macron era. 

But another senior RN official, Sébastien Chenu, avoided questions on whether the RN would immediately seek to topple a Barnier government.

“The French did not go and vote in the legislative elections and say to themselves I hope to come out of this with Barnier as prime minister,” Chenu told BFM TV.

He added, however, that the party would “wait and see” while it examined Barnier’s position on electoral reform and on the idea of introducing an element of proportionality in future ballots, an RN demand.