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New France PM Barnier promises ‘change’ as he takes office

France's new right-wing Prime Minister Michel Barnier promised on Thursday to address the grievances of the French but also implement "change" as he took office following almost two months of political deadlock.

Published: 6 September 2024 08:45 CEST
New France PM Barnier promises 'change' as he takes office
Newly appointed French Prime minister Michel Barnier gestures during the handover ceremony at the Hotel Matignon in Paris, on September 5, 2024. (Photo by GEOFFROY VAN DER HASSELT / AFP)

President Emmanuel Macron tasked the 73-year-old veteran politician with forming a government earlier in the day, seeking to move forward after July snap elections in which his centrist alliance lost its relative majority in parliament.

Barnier, the European Union’s former Brexit negotiator and an ex-foreign minister, is the oldest premier in the history of modern France.

He takes over from 35-year-old Gabriel Attal, a man less than half his age who served only eight months in office during a period of political turbulence unprecedented in recent times in France.

At a handover ceremony, Barnier said the priorities of his government would include “responding, as much as we can, to the challenges, to the angers, to the suffering” of French people.

He said that education, security and “immigration control” would remain at the top of the agenda, and that he would be unafraid to speak the truth on tough issues such as the country’s “financial debt”.

READ MORE: What you should know about Michel Barnier and how he’d like to change France

But “there will also be change”, said the member of the right-wing Les Republicains (LR) party who is not affiliated with the president’s centrist faction.

A left-wing coalition emerged as France’s biggest political force after the elections earlier this summer, but without enough seats for an overall majority in an imbroglio that has taken weeks to unravel.

Macron’s centrist faction and the far right make up the two other major groups in the National Assembly, with the RN as the single largest party.

The left has greeted Macron’s move towards “cohabitation” with Barnier with dismay, and will now seek to topple him with a no-confidence motion.

READ MORE: What happens next in France after Macron finally names new PM?

Controversially, the president appears to be counting on the far-right Rassemblement National (RN) of Marine Le Pen to keep Barnier in power by voting against such a motion.

Macron’s decision comes under the gun of a deadline to submit a draft 2025 budget for France’s strained government finances before October 1.

Barnier’s “task looks tough, but difficulty has never scared him”, said former prime minister Edouard Philippe, who announced earlier this week that he would seek to succeed Macron in 2027 presidential elections.

After the July elections, Macron drew out the appointment of a new prime minister for a period unprecedented since World War II, through the July-August Olympic Games and beyond.

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PARIS

Paris and Milan: Closest in the world to becoming ’15-minute cities’

Paris and Milan are among the cities closest to reaching the urban planning goal of being a "15-minute city," while car-dependent metropolises in the United States and elsewhere lag behind, a worldwide analysis said on Monday.

Published: 16 September 2024 17:29 CEST
Paris and Milan: Closest in the world to becoming '15-minute cities'

In fact, the central areas of many cities already meet the definition of a 15 minute-city, which means that residents are within a quarter-hour walk or bike ride from everything they need to a lead a good life, the analysis found.

But even within a city, there are often stark differences between the wealthy inner cities and the urban sprawl on their outskirts, according to the Italian researchers behind the new study.

The concept of the 15-minute city gained traction during the Covid pandemic, when lockdowns put more focus on local neighbourhoods.

It has since been embraced by dozens of mayors around the world — and become the target of conspiracy theorists online.

For the new study, published in the journal Nature Cities, the researchers built an online database looking at roughly 10,000 cities globally.

They used open source data to map out how far of a walk or cycle residents were from different services, including shops, restaurants, education, exercise and healthcare.

“A lot of people already live in a 15-minute city,” study co-author Hygor Piaget Monteiro Melo told AFP.

But it depends on where you look within a city, he said, because of the inequality in access to services between the centre and periphery.

No ‘utopia’

What is clear, the researchers noted, is that population density is a crucial factor — if enough people are living close enough to each other, it is much easier for them to have easy access to services.

This meant that somewhat smaller yet relatively dense cities such as Italy’s Milan or Spain’s Barcelona scored well on their map, which was made available online.

When it came to the biggest cities, “Paris is an outlier,” lead study author Matteo Bruno told AFP.

The mayor of Paris embraced the concept in 2020, and a “considerable fraction” of the city is below the 15-minute mark, the study said.

Some European cities have a head start because they were built centuries ago at a time before cars — when basically all towns had to be 15-minute cities, the researchers said.

Cities built more recently with cars specifically in mind — particularly in the United States — fared far less well on the map.

Atlanta in particular stood out as being a long way from being a 15-minute city. Future Olympic host Los Angeles also lagged behind most others for walkability, as did several Chinese cities including Chongqing.

But when it comes to cities, there are always trade-offs — and there is no single right answer, the researchers said.

“The 15-minute city is often presented as a utopia — it’s not,” Bruno said.

Americans in sprawled-out cities usually have their own houses and backyards, while Europeans in densely populated cities tend to live in apartments, illustrating the important role played by culture, Bruno said.

And central parts of US cities such as New York, San Francisco and Milwaukee were under the 15-minute threshold.

“Manhattan is definitely one of the most 15-minute places ever in the world,” said Bruno, a researcher at Sony Computer Science Laboratories in Rome.

‘Conspiracy mongers’

There has been confusion about the concept in the past, the researchers lamented.

For example, “traffic has nothing to do with the 15-minute city,” Bruno said.

In fact, slow traffic could indicate an area is more pedestrian friendly, he added.

Yet it was new “low-traffic zones” in the UK that turned the ire of conspiracy theorists towards 15-minute city proponents.

Confusing the two ideas, online groups including vaccine and climate sceptics falsely claimed that 15-minute cities were part of a secret plot to restrict the movement of citizens.

The Italian researchers, who have themselves been targeted by “Twitter haters,” emphasised that nothing about the 15-minute city concept involves confining anyone.

Researcher Carlos Moreno, a high-profile proponent of 15-minute cities who has advised Paris Mayor Anne Hidalgo, was also “attacked by the worldwide conspiracy mongers,” he told AFP.

Moreno welcomed the new study, praising how the idea had swiftly become a topic of interest for researchers around the world.

Just last week, Valerie Pecresse, the right-wing head of the greater Paris Ile-de-France area, presented a plan for a 20-minute region, he pointed out.

Bruno said that the 15-minute metric is just one element in the “recipe” that makes a good city.

Other parts of the recipe include tackling inequality and segregation, improving public transport, reducing traffic and so on, he said.

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