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What happens next now that France has a new PM?

After weeks of waiting, France finally has a new prime minister, Michel Barnier. Among his first tasks will be naming a new cabinet, getting a budget bill ready, and surviving a possible a vote-of-no-confidence. Here's what's in store for French politics in the coming weeks.

Published: 5 September 2024 15:17 CEST
Updated: 8 September 2024 05:37 CEST
What happens next now that France has a new PM?
French president Emmanuel Macron (L) with Michel Barnier at the Elysee palace in Paris, on January 31, 2020. (Photo by Ludovic MARIN / AFP)

French President Emmanuel Macron on Thursday named the European Union’s former Brexit negotiator, Michel Barnier, as the country’s next prime minister.

The country has faced weeks of political deadlock after snap parliamentary elections in July, which led to the formation of three distinct ideological groups in parliament.

The left-wing coalition, Nouvelle Front Populaire (NFP), took home the largest portion of seats (193), followed by Macron’s centrist coalition with 164, and then the far-right Rassemblement National with 143.

No party won an absolute majority (289 seats).

As such, Macron weighed several possible options for prime minister, out of fear that the person chosen would risk a no-confidence motion from one of the blocs in parliament.

In the end he went for Michel Barnier, who had been in the race to be the centre-right Les Republicains candidate in the 2022 presidential election.

So what happens next?

The first step will be the transfer of powers between former prime minister Gabriel Attal and new PM Michel Barnier. This will take place at 6pm on Thursday.

Once officially in the role, Michel Barnier will be tasked with forming “a unifying government in the service of the country”, the presidency wrote in their statement on Thursday, announcing Barnier’s appointment.

Barnier will need to quickly propose new ministers to the president. They will replace the outgoing caretaker cabinet.

This will be a challenging task, as Barnier will need to form a team that is capable of building coalitions and finding compromise amid the fragmented political situation. 

Taking over from 35-year-old Gabriel Attal, a centrist half his age who was the country’s first openly gay premier, Barnier pledged to take on his new task with “humility”.

He said education, security and “immigration control” were his priorities and said he would be unafraid to speak the truth on the country’s “financial debt”, but also promised “change”.

Barnier was to meet Attal, who remains leader of the president’s centrist Together for the Republic (EPR) group in parliament, on Friday before talking to the leaders of his own Republicans (LR) party to discuss the make-up of a new cabinet, his aides said.

Meetings with left-wing politicians, the hard-left France Unbowed (LFI) party and the RN should follow, the aides said.

“He wants solid, competent and effective ministers,” one of his aides said, and “will have the freedom of choosing” them.

Vote of no-confidence ahead?

Then he will move onto the task of legislating, all while considering the possibility of a vote of no-confidence from opposing factions.

This no-confidence vote could be called by the left-wing opposition. La France Insoumise leader, Jean-Luc Mélenchon has already claimed the appointment means that July’s election was ‘stolen’, after the left-wing group’s preferred PM candidate was rejected.

To pass, a vote of no-confidence must receive the votes of an absolute majority of the members of the Assemblée Nationale.

A vote of no-confidence can be put forward at the spontaneous initiative of MPs, but since 1958 only one vote of no-confidence has been successful.

If a vote is called it would take place almost immediately. Opposition groups could unite against Macron’s party and topple his new PM, meaning Macron would be back to square one.

There’s nothing in the parliamentary process that forces an election after a successful vote of no-confidence and France cannot have parliamentary elections for another year.

Policy speech

Barnier will need to lay out his programme with a policy speech, and this will be decisive for the backing he receives in parliament.

Far-right leader Marine Le Pen has already said that her group will wait to see Barnier’s programme before deciding whether to back him or be part of his cabinet.

Critics say Macron has made Le Pen the de-facto kingmaker, despite long presenting himself as a bulwark against the far right.

Le Monde daily described Barnier as a “prime minister under the surveillance of the RN”. The left-leaning Liberation daily put a picture of Barnier on its front page with “approved by Marine Le Pen” as a rubber stamp.

Lawmakers now have less than a month to submit a draft 2025 budget for France’s strained government finances before October 1st.

The law must then be voted on by both the Assemblée Nationale and the Senate, and published before January 1st, but it is a huge text (the 2024 version was 416 pages) and it involves all of the ministries’ cooperation, which takes time.

It is possible that there will be some delays and the October 1st deadline will not be met. A spokesperson for the Prime Minister’s office told Franceinfo on Tuesday that “the Constitution provides for 70 days of examination of the budget bill by parliament (…) theoretically this allows the next government up to mid-October, if it wishes, to submit the budget to parliament”.

The new PM (and parliament) will also have to think about reassuring Brussels, at a moment where France has been targeted for its excessive deficit.

Earlier in the week, the French finance ministry warned that public deficit in France is at risk of reaching 5.6 percent of GDP this year and even 6.2 percent in 2025.

Old bills and laws

Several bills were put on hold due to the snap parliamentary elections, and it will be up to Barnier and his new government to decide whether to put them back onto the legislative agenda.

However, bills that already passed their first reading in the Assemblée Nationale (prior to the elections) will “go on to their second reading with the Assemblée or to the joint committee”, French constitution expert Jean-Philippe Derosier told Franceinfo.

One notable bill affected by the dissolution of parliament was the  right-to-die bill backed by Macron, which aimed to make assisted suicide legal in France.

MPs had been able to begin initial debates, voting on a number of amendments, but the bill has technically ‘lapsed’.

This means that for it to be considered again, it was necessary for the new government to resubmit the text to the bureau of the Assemblée Nationale.

Olivier Falorni, an MP from Charente-Maritime, did so on July 19th, and the new bill ‘incorporates the full text voted by the committee and all the amendments adopted during the sitting’, according to La Provence.

As such, debates will begin once the Assemblée Nationale resumes work.

What about the tasks of the PM? 

The simple explanation of the PM’s role is that they run the government, while the president runs the country, but it is of course more complicated in reality.

The French prime minister is focused on the day-to-day tasks running of the government and heading up the Council of Ministers, which takes the key decisions of government. 

READ MORE: What does a French Prime Minister actually do?

In some areas the PM acts as the president’s deputy or does the jobs that the president doesn’t want to do – for example, when Emmanuel Macron announced his first controversial pension reforms in 2019 it was the job of then-prime minister Edouard Philippe to meet with the unions and try (unsuccessfully) to get them onside.

The role of Prime Minister is the second highest office in France, although if the president dies in office his role is taken by the president of the Senate. 

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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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