President Emmanuel Macron of France appointed Michel Barnier, a veteran right-wing politician and the European Union’s former top negotiator on Brexit, as the new prime minister on Thursday, in hopes of breaking a political deadlock that has gripped the country since inconclusive snap parliamentary elections almost two months ago.
The French presidency said in a statement that Mr. Macron had entrusted Mr. Barnier “with the task of forming a unity government to serve the country and the French people.”
Mr. Macron’s announcement came as criticism of him mounted over an extraordinary delay in naming a prime minister. Weeks of consultations with political leaders proved fruitless as a rotating cast of potential candidates were floated by the presidency one day and shot down by opponents the next.
Mr. Barnier, 73, is a member of The Republicans, France’s main conservative party. His appointment is bound to infuriate the New Popular Front, the alliance of left-wing parties that beat expectations and won the most seats in the parliamentary elections in July. Their candidate for prime minister, Lucie Castets, a little-known civil servant, was summarily rejected by Mr. Macron.
“This appointment comes after an unprecedented cycle of consultations during which, in line with his constitutional duty, the president sought to ensure that the prime minister and the government would be as stable as possible and give themselves the chance to rally the widest possible support,” the statement from the presidency said.
Neither the New Popular Front nor any other party or coalition came close to the absolute majority of 289 seats required to govern unimpeded, and few parties were inclined to work together — leaving France without any clear governing coalition.
Never in the 66-year history of the Fifth Republic had the country been so long — more than 50 days — without an active government. The political paralysis began on July 16 with the resignation of Gabriel Attal, the former prime minister, who had stayed on in a caretaker capacity.
Mr. Barnier is an adept negotiator, having painstakingly found an agreement on Brexit, but he will inevitably struggle with the same difficulty in finding an effective or consistent parliamentary majority that confounded Mr. Macron’s search.
The centrist alliance led by Mr. Macron’s party lost seats in the elections and was left with only 166. The far-right National Rally party of Marine Le Pen gained many seats and now controls 142 alongside its allies.
In an extraordinary turnabout, Mr. Macron, having rejected the National Rally as a party alien to the democratic arc of the Republic, a force to be kept outside the gates of power at any cost, found himself negotiating daily with Ms. Le Pen in the hope of securing her party’s acceptance of a center-right candidate. In effect, she has had what appeared to amount to a veto over the process in the past several days.
Mr. Macron had little choice. Having rejected the left despite its victory, albeit one that did not allow it to govern on its own, only the acquiescence of the National Rally could protect a center-right candidate like Mr. Barnier from an immediate loss in a parliamentary no-confidence vote.
The New Popular Front said in a statement that Ms. Castets was still the rightful nominee and that “a government from the presidential camp can only survive with the tacit support of the extreme right.”
The left has called for a large demonstration against Mr. Macron in Paris on Saturday. The hard-left France Unbowed party has even started an official process to remove Mr. Macron from office on the grounds that he was refusing to accept the results of the parliamentary elections, although that effort has very little chance of succeeding.
Mr. Macron had called a political truce for the 2024 Summer Olympics, which were held in Paris. The Games proved to be a great and unifying success for France, a credit to the presidency that momentarily relieved pressure on him. But anger against Mr. Macron has ballooned over the past few weeks.
That Mr. Macron himself precipitated the crisis, when to the dismay of his own government and most of France he decided in June to dissolve the lower house of Parliament and call elections, has only added to the general outrage.
Alarmed lawmakers warned that without a government it would become increasingly complicated to pass a budget by the end of the year, as is legally mandated. In its caretaker role, Mr. Attal’s outgoing government could not make many important decisions.
Mr. Barnier, who grew up the Savoie region in the French Alps, was first elected to Parliament in 1978. In the 1990s and 2000s he occupied several ministerial positions in right-wing cabinets, putting him in charge of the environment, European affairs, foreign affairs and agriculture. His political career continued at the European level, where he was an E.U. commissioner and, from 2016 to 2021, the bloc’s chief negotiator as it navigated Britain’s withdrawal.
Appointing the prime minister, who runs the country on a day-to-day basis, is a presidential prerogative. There is no constitutionally mandated deadline to do so, and it usually happens in the days or at most the weeks that follow a parliamentary election.
But Mr. Macron delayed the decision as he struggled to find someone he believed would survive a no-confidence vote in the fractured National Assembly, as the lower house of Parliament is known. He has been driven by a determination to achieve stability and to safeguard his major economic measures, including raising the legal retirement age to 64 from 62. The left has vowed to undo that and other changes that Mr. Macron says have made the French economy more competitive, like lower taxes.
Political opponents argued that Mr. Macron had a democratic obligation, after the defeat of his party, to allow the Parliament to debate and decide on such issues. But in the end distrust of the left outweighed rejection of the far right; and a very personal approach to the decision reinforced the view of Mr. Macron as a remote figure relying almost exclusively on his own judgment.
“Emmanuel Macron thinks that he is going to settle the issue of governability himself,” François Hollande, Mr. Macron’s Socialist predecessor and a newly elected lawmaker, told the television show “Quotidien” on Wednesday. “I think that he is making a mistake, because it is up to the National Assembly to decide.”
Mr. Macron’s hands were free for his previous prime ministerial picks — Édouard Philippe, in 2017; Jean Castex, in 2020; Élisabeth Borne, in 2022; and Mr. Attal, in January — because his party either dominated the lower house or had enough seats to insulate the cabinet from most parliamentary challenges.
During the long interlude leading to Mr. Barnier’s appointment, Mr. Philippe, a popular center-right politician, announced that he would be a candidate in the 2027 presidential election that will decide the successor to Mr. Macron, who is term-limited. The high point of “Macronism” — a centrist mix of shifting policies without an effective political party and dedicated to marginalizing the traditional right and left — is long passed.
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