“I don’t know what we will do when we no longer have this house”: at La Lanterne, Emmanuel Macron discusses with Nicolas Sarkozy, September 24, 2023. The man is already thinking about his life afterward, he redoubt, the president is looking for ways to give time to time. Better still, he would like to rediscover the enthusiasm of yesteryear, the dynamic of the beginnings. “Youth is the only good that is worth”: how can we avoid having our mandate resemble the portrait of Dorian Gray? How to escape an inglorious end, he who only dreams of epic? Already the companions of the first hour are moving away, because of disappointment, because of death, because of both. In December, with the immigration law, the Macronist arc was stretched to the point of being close to breaking. There is danger in delay.
From La Lanterne, the hunting lodge where he spent New Year’s Eve on December 31 and the weekend preceding the start of his second five-year term, light burst forth: Gabriel Attal is propelled to Matignon, whose identity is first a number, 34 years. Unlike its predecessors, it does not come out of the shadows. And is not in the habit of letting the spotlight turn away from him. But Emmanuel Macron believes, whatever the subject, that he will do better than the others. In September, the president appeared in person at a security meeting whose purpose was, in particular, the barrier of the avenue leading to the Palace of Versailles, in order to welcome King Charles III in the best possible conditions…
Finding the right functioning, that is to say the right distance with the president, is a challenge for a minister, it is a challenge for a Prime Minister. On October 30, in Villers-Cotterêts, Emmanuel Macron had barely finished his speech when the Minister of Culture, Rima Abdul Malak, never left his side. Gabriel Attal stays aside: several teachers come to greet him, he talks with everyone. “He always makes sure to keep an adequate distance, he is the first to laugh at the end of the Council of Ministers,” notes a close friend of the head of state.
“For a left-wing guy, you’re more right-wing than me!”
Emmanuel Macron makes fun of the courtiers – he was amused to receive a long message last week from Olivier Véran, who justified a statement on Gérard Depardieu by assuring him that he had been trapped on BFM -, but he hates to see his authority not fully respected. Jupiter is not dead. Rima Abdul Malak unleashed his anger by not informing him, the grand master of the institution, that the grand chancellery of the Legion of Honor had initiated disciplinary proceedings against Gérard Depardieu – General François Lecointre, great chancellor, had not done so and he had to explain this to the head of state. At National Education, for example before announcing that he was postponing the start of the school year in middle and high schools after the Arras attack, Gabriel Attal took care to telephone Emmanuel Macron.
“But Elisabeth, you don’t exist!” During a meeting of the majority at the time of the 2022 legislative elections, some were startled when they heard François Bayrou address the Prime Minister in these unkind terms. Matignon’s ex recognized it – even joked about it with some of his ministers: the team meetings, the team building, cajoling, in short, management, was not his thing. And Gabriel Attal, then? How many divisions? The new head of government is undoubtedly full of qualities, but a sense of community is not one of them. He will have to force his nature, multiply the efforts and, dare we dare, the proofs of love to make the young minister forget in the minds of the future members of his government. “He is solitary; he only gets involved in the collective with the ambition that it will be of service to him,” says a minister with whom he worked closely. “I think he considers that few people are worthy of his interest,” adds a pillar of the government when asked about this annoying habit that Gabriel Attal has of not talking with his colleagues.
And let’s move on to those who, for six years, have sworn to detect his paw in the anonymous scum aimed at them in the newspapers. Jean-Michel Blanquer still has the escape from his weekend in Ibiza stuck in his throat. And Gérald Darmanin came to this conclusion after reading in the press the story of their summer breakfast supposed to usher in the era of cordial understanding between these two ambitious people: “We can’t deal with Gabriel.” Trust is hardly decreed, it is built: if the members of his cabinet are ready to die for him, those in the government will have to forget their bitter memories. Some knew Gabriel Attal as a ministerial collaborator seven years ago, Bruno Le Maire, his former head of department at Bercy, hazed him less than a year ago to mark his territory. Imagine the animals that are the Minister of the Economy, Gérald Darmanin, or Olivier Dussopt having their tasks dictated to them or taken back by the one they discovered as a lion cub. Year of audacity, yes; humility, too.
Facing the jungle, fortunately, there is the right, which observes its rise with curiosity. She could almost adopt this former socialist, who worked in Marisol Touraine’s office. He straddles his themes, and speaks his language. In Education, he bans the abaya at school, outlines an experiment with the uniform and promises a “shock of knowledge”. He engages in the fight against school bullying with martial rhetoric, shaking his own administration. LR drinks whey and detects a cultural victory in this passage on rue de Grenelle.
The president of the Republicans Eric Ciotti had fun with the person concerned one day: “For a guy on the left, you are more to the right than me! If you were on the right, what would it be like…” left, Attal? It certainly comes from there. But the man does not define himself in this way, and prefers to place himself in “the central space of overcoming opened by the president”. Beware of partisan labels, they take away all ideological mobility. And he’s the plastic type. “He is the one, in the historical macronie, who knew how to accompany the sociological evolution of the Macron electorate,” notes an elected official. This summer, the LR MP for Orne Véronique Louwagie reported by SMS a question from a resident of her constituency: “Attal, is he from the right or the left?” He laughs at it, replies, in essence, that it is improving like good wine.
If the right is interested in Gabriel Attal, the converse is true. The minister likes to interact with LR deputies. At Bercy, he had many individual interviews with them. Here, an interview with LR n°3 Annie Genevard. There, discussions with the deputy for Loire Antoine Vermorel. We must carefully identify this elusive group, arbiter in the National Assembly. We decipher the political situation and the work under relative majority. Gabriel Attal is amused to see the boss of LR deputies Olivier Marleix using the pronoun “we” in front of him, he who is struggling so much to hold his parliamentary group together. LR is more like “62 me”. Gabriel Attal does not lack assets in the face of this aggregation of individuals: his socialist youth protects him from any treason trial and he avoids any unnecessary provocation towards a very sensitive right. Gérald Darmanin paid to learn during the examination of the immigration bill. The tenant of Matignon finally enjoys an advantage over Elisabeth Borne: no major text is expected in the hemicycle this year. “It arrives in fairly calm waters,” notes an LR deputy.
Macronie is definitely no longer what it used to be. Now nostalgia, a previously unknown feeling, makes its entrance. At the Elysée, it’s time to return. Advisor Jonathan Guémas returned, and also an aide-de-camp who was there at the start of the adventure or the head of protocol. What, was it better before? “I said everything in my wishes,” repeats the president. The echo therefore announced a year 2024 synonymous with “risk-taking, daring” allowing the famous “rearmament” promised during his speech. The appointment of a historical record or almost is there to signify that the return to the sources of Macronism is synonymous with all of this.
Through his youth, through his career, through his recent decisions at the Ministry of National Education, Gabriel Attal embodies the beginnings, the famous reforming impulse which over the five-year terms has never ceased to come up against the crises and obstacles that ‘they induce. Gabriel Attal embodies more than that, he also embodies the return to the people. No need to shout, not the people in the sociological sense, no, the people in the popular sense. They have not escaped Emmanuel Macron, the recent opinion studies in which the elected official from Hauts-de-Seine climbs, climbs until becoming, in December, the favorite political personality of the French, ahead for the first time of a small point the former Prime Minister Edouard Philippe. It’s just the beginning, he’ll take the light a lot, he’s used to looking for it. This is why we must ensure, to complete the loop, the long-term loyalty of this Prime Minister arriving at the moment when the succession begins to be prepared. Inventing a new presidential candidate for 2027 – as Emmanuel Macron had already done on France 5 in December – is not a problem, quite the contrary: the multiplication of loaves is a miracle. The more there are, the less one emerges.
Gabriel Attal also has the flavor, for the president, of regained freedom; and for any tenant of the Elysée, confined by responsibilities, time and entourage, it is not nothing. When the idea of naming it rue de Varenne arose, a revolt was organized. The “old hands”, those of the famous “political dinners” organized at the Elysée when Emmanuel Macron needs to eat before a highlight of his five-year term, have little taste for this Prime Minister who is frankly younger than them, at least as arrogant and certainly no less ambitious. François Bayrou, Edouard Philippe and even the permanent secretary general Alexis Kohler would have tried to dissuade the leader. After all, Richard Ferrand and François Bayrou had already managed to obtain his renunciation when in May 2022 he planned to appoint Catherine Vautrin to Matignon. Even a president doesn’t do what he wants… This time, he wants one thing: not to appear hindered. The relative majority, the painful episode of the immigration law are enough for his happiness. Attal Prime Minister, and regained authority.
In the fall, in front of a political friend, Emmanuel Macron thought out loud and intelligibly: “I am not going to take Gabriel out of Education to send him to the Europeans…” During the 2022 presidential campaign, Gabriel Attal had had the opportunity to debate on several occasions with Jordan Bardella, future head of the RN list, and already considered that he was the most “effective” of all. During the first five-year term, the two men found themselves one day by chance on a plane connecting Paris and Marseille: for an hour and a half, they had discussed, two young people whose ambition has few limits, two young people who have sacrificed everything or almost everything for politics, an endangered species. 2024 is their year – for starters.
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