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France’s new PM constructs cabinet under far right shadow

France's new right-wing prime minister Friday sought to cobble together a government capable of mustering parliament backing, as critics lambasted the president for turning the far right into a kingmaker after snap polls.

Published: 7 September 2024 15:05 CEST
France's new PM constructs cabinet under far right shadow
Newly appointed French Prime Minister Michel Barnier gestures during the handover ceremony at the Hotel Matignon in Paris. Photo: Sarah Meyssonnier/POOL/AFP.

Michel Barnier, a 73-year-old former foreign minister who recently acted as the European Union’s Brexit negotiator, is the oldest premier in the history of modern France.

He vowed in a prime-time TV interview late Friday that he had “nothing, or not much, in common with the theories or ideology of the National Rally” (RN), the far-right outfit that became the single largest party in a fragmented parliament after the polls on July 7.

President Emmanuel Macron took the risk of dissolving parliament in June after the far right trounced his alliance in European elections.

But where he hoped to defuse the RN’s appeal, the party made massive gains.

Combined with a bumper result for the left-wing NFP alliance, that cost Macron’s centrists their relative majority in the National Assembly.

The left ended up as the largest bloc but far from an absolute majority, leaving Macron wiggle room to avoid naming their pick as head of government to howls of outrage.

READ ALSO: What happens next now that France has a new PM?

But the president has for weeks been trying to identify a potential prime minister who would not immediately be toppled in a confidence vote, consulting especially with the RN on who they might accept.

Gestures to the left

Macron landed on traditional conservative Barnier to replace 35-year-old Gabriel Attal — a centrist half his age who was the country’s first openly gay premier.

Le Pen, who leads RN lawmakers in parliament, has said her party would not be part of the new cabinet, and would wait for Barnier’s first policy speech in front of parliament to decide whether or not to back him.

The left in particular has bristled at Barnier’s nomination and will likely seek to topple him in the lower house.

Barnier himself told broadcaster TF1 Friday that he was opening to naming ministers of all political stripes, including “yes, people from the left” and made several policy gestures towards the NFP.

He suggested “more tax justice” — hinting at taxing the wealthiest more heavily — to fund France’s ailing public services, while also calling for faster growth powered by business.

Barnier also said he would seek “improvements” to Macron’s unpopular 2023 pension reform, a bugbear for the left which included an increase in the official retirement age to 64.

“I will open the debate on improving this law for the most vulnerable people, and I will do it with the social partners” in business and trade unions, Barnier said — while insisting on “sticking to the budgetary constraints”.

And he equated France’s massive government debt — around 110 percent of output — with an environmental “debt” of failure to act on climate change and other issues.

“We’ve had enough of signing blank cheques at the expense of future generations on the environment as well as on the public finances,” Barnier said.

“We won’t increase this debt”.

He also said he would address immigration, one of the far-right’s favourite themes.

“People still feel that the borders are like a sieve,” Barnier said, adding that “we will get migration flows under control,… in a tough and humanist way”.

No-confidence motion

Ahead of Barnier’s interview, Manuel Bompard, coordinator of the hard-left France Unbowed (LFI), accused Macron of “betraying” the voters who in the second round of the elections of July 7 had voted tactically to prevent the far right coming to power.

“It’s a Macron-Le Pen government,” he told BFMTV, describing three-time presidential candidate Marine Le Pen as a “kingmaker” for the president.

“It can only see the light of day because the National Rally has decided to give it its blessing,” he added.

Lucie Castets, the 37-year-old economist who the left wanted to become premier, vowed to table a motion of no confidence against Barnier.

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.

Both Attal, now leading Macron’s centrist troops in parliament, and his conservative counterpart Laurent Wauquiez said their camps could join Barnier’s government, but would wait and see what his policies are first.

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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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