Can Gabriel Attal win France?

Gabriel Attal, 34, is a new breed of French prime minister, more inclined to Diet Coke than a good Burgundy, at home with social media and revelations about his personal life, a natural communicator who belts out one-liners like “France rhymes with power” to assert his ‘authority’, a favorite word.

Since taking office in early January, the boyish-looking Mr. Attal has waded into the countryside, far from his usual haunts in the posh neighborhoods of Paris, muddied his dress shoes, propped up his notes on a choreographed bale of hay and calmed the protests. farmers through deft negotiations, leavened by multiple concessions.

He has told railway workers threatening a strike that ‘work is a duty’, not a run-of-the-mill French admonition. He showed off his new dog on Instagram, explaining that he named the energetic Chow Chow ‘Volta’ after the inventor of the electric battery. He has told the National Assembly that he is living proof of a changing France as “a prime minister who accepts his homosexuality.”

France is giving in, but whether the country is ready for the control-the-narrative politics of emotion and distraction that Mr. Attal embodies is an open question. Time is short. The Prime Minister’s mission, as conceived by embattled President Emmanuel Macron, is clear: to reverse the rise of Marine Le Pen’s far right ahead of the European Parliament elections in June and the French presidential elections in just over three year.

Mr Macron is term-limited and must leave office in 2027; the specter haunting him is Mrs Le Pen as his successor. With Mr. Attal, he hopes to cultivate one of his own.

“Macron is amazed by Attal, as you are amazed by someone who, like you, has committed an offense, and who at the same time is of absolute loyalty,” said Marisol Touraine, a former health and social affairs minister who was Mr. Attal’s father . political guru, said in an interview. “The president believes in Attal’s political sixth sense.”

The ‘transgression’ of both men was that of the restless youth against the old order. Neither Mr Macron nor Mr Attal have ever seen a taboo that he did not want to break. Mr. Macron was a one-man revolution when he came to power in 2017 at the age of 39, proclaiming that the politics of left and right were defunct and offering a malleable post-ideological thing called “macronism.”

Now, almost seven years later, Macron is looking to his protégé, or some say clone, to reinject political excitement. Pragmatism, not conviction, is what Mr. Attal defined. Now he must deliver in a irritable France, without an absolute majority in parliament and in the knowledge that, as former Transport Minister Clément Beaune put it: “It is very hard to be Prime Minister here, because it is the President who decides.”

“The question that looms is how far Macron will let Attal go without becoming jealous,” said Philippe Labro, author and political commentator. Sharing the spotlight is not easy for Mr. Macron, as became clear when a former prime minister, Édouard Philippe, became popular and was softened.

A recent poll for Paris Match magazine showed Mr. Attal with an approval rating of 47 percent, high by French standards. Mr. Macron dropped to 32 percent, while Ms. Le Pen fell to 43 percent.

The challenge for Mr Attal will be to use the hand Mr Marcon has dealt him, but not appear to bite it as he steps out of the president’s shadow. The two men have already said goodbye during Ms Le Pen’s National Rally.

This month, Mr. Macron said he considers the party “outside the arc of the republic,” which broadly means anti-democratic, just as Mr. Attal declared that the “arc of the republic is the hemisphere” of the National Assembly, and that he would work with all parties there, including the far-right party, which has 89 seats.

“Attal wants to become president and will do everything he can to achieve that,” said Ms Touraine, whose daughter was a friend of Mr Attal at school. “Is he ambitious? Yes, in an extreme way. But he has no complexes. He assumes who he is and I think that is positive.”

Mr Attal, who did not respond to requests for an interview, has had a whirlwind political journey to the prime minister’s office, known as Matignon. Born in 1989 into a wealthy Parisian family, Jewish on his father’s side and Orthodox Christian on his mother’s side, he was educated at an elite private school and the prestigious Sciences Po University in Paris before entering politics, essentially the only job available. he ever had. .

“École Alsacienne, Sciences Po, National Assembly, Ministry of Education, Matignon, Gabriel Attal’s career covers 6 kilometers,” mocked François Ruffin, a left-wing lawmaker on X, formerly Twitter, added: “Disruption and daring, but not too far out of its league.”

However, Mr. Attal’s childhood was not without problems. As a teenager, he was bullied at school because he was gay. “It was a barrage of insults and abuse, and it continued for months with extreme violence,” he told TF1 television last year. “I suffered.”

The suffering was compounded because he did not want to tell his family for fear “they would ask why this was said” when he was not ready to talk about his homosexuality. Finally, a decade later, Mr. Attal, in his account, approached his father on his deathbed in 2015 and said, “Dad, I have fallen in love with a man.” His father responded positively, wanting to meet the man, but died the next day.

France, where the privacy of love and sex has been almost sacrosanct, is not used to such dramatic confessions, but Mr. Attal is a disruptor even as he employs extreme discipline. As a “control freak,” in Ms. Touraine’s words, he has understood that in the age of short attention spans, the way to dictate the agenda is through relentless, varied communication.

He has also understood that this is an era in which nationalist politics thrives on the fear of immigration. During his brief stint as education minister, he banned the abaya, the loose-fitting long robe, used by some female Muslim students. Leaders of France’s large Muslim community and the left were outraged; they are not fans of Mr. Attal. During Cabinet meetings, Mr Attal was known for insisting that the government accept the need to take immediate action on immigration.

Mr Attal’s hard-hitting inaugural speech to Parliament last month was an anthem to “a nation without equal.” He would, he said, “refuse to allow our identity to be diluted or dissolved.”

“You are not negotiating with the Republic,” he hammered. “You accept and respect the whole, without a single exception!”

As an appeal to Ms. Le Pen’s voters, it was hardly subtle.

The journey to the right has been a long one. Mr Attal’s roots, like Mr Macron’s, were socialist. Starting out in the party’s moderate social democratic wing, Mr Attal served two internships with Ms Touraine, then a Socialist representative, before joining her team at the Ministry of Health and Social Affairs in 2012.

He was 23. Few people knew the determination behind his even-tempered demeanor.

“You don’t feel his ambition at first,” says Luc Broussy, who regularly worked with Mr Attal as an expert in the field of aging. “I never saw him angry. He never betrayed his beliefs because I never saw him affirm any.”

As the Macron bandwagon gained momentum in 2016, Mr. Attal wavered. He had temporarily accepted a job arranged by Mrs. Touraine at the French diplomatic mission to the United Nations in New York.

At the same time, however, he had fallen in love and formed a couple with Stéphane Séjourné, now the Minister of Foreign Affairs, who had and remains close to Mr Macron; and in early 2017, a Macron victory in the presidential elections suddenly seemed all but inevitable.

“He joined Macron at the last minute and this incredible adventure began,” Mr Broussy said. Ms Touraine remembers telling Mr Attal in March 2017: “It’s now or never.”

Mr. Attal jumped. Three months later, he was a representative in the National Assembly when Macron’s centrist party La République en Marche (now Renaissance) won the June parliamentary elections.

“Without Séjourné, I am not sure Attal would have become a Macronist MP in 2017,” Ms Touraine said. (He and Mr. Séjourné have since separated.)

Soon the records began to tumble as Mr Macron adopted Mr Attal as his favourite. In 2018, at the age of 29, he became the youngest minister of a government of the French Fifth Republic as Secretary of State for Education; then the youngest Minister of Education in 2023 and the youngest Prime Minister in 2024.

The task now before him is daunting. He wants to ‘unlock’ the economy – ‘A bureaucracy in retreat is freedom in progress!’ – in a country that is deeply committed to its social safety net.

He wants to promote green energy against a wave of protests about its high costs. He is a representative of the elite class that people in remote areas say is alienated from the hardships of real life – a theme that Ms Le Pen likes to hammer home.

Last but not least, Attal must nurture his own fierce presidential ambitions while simultaneously showing loyalty to Macron, even as the battle to succeed the president has already begun.

Before he died in 2015, Mr. Attal’s father, a Jew of Tunisian descent, told him: “You are not a Jew, but everyone will think you are. So it’s like you are.”

Mr. Attal, who was raised in the Orthodox Church but is not religious, has spoken about this scene, as well as the homophobic and anti-Semitic tirades he has sometimes encountered on social media. If anything, these attacks seem to have made him stronger.

“One thing I know for sure about him is that if anything inhabits and torments him, and I truly believe he is tormented, it is ambition that allows him to overcome all that,” Ms. Touraine said.