Henry Samuel
in Paris
20 September 2024 2:45pm
Emmanuel Macron has reportedly objected to France’s new prime minister, Michel Barnier, appointing a senator who campaigned against same-sex marriage as “families minister” in his new cabinet.
Mr Macron, 46, slapped down Mr Barnier’s proposal to offer the symbolic ministerial post to Laurence Garnier, a conservative senator from the Right-wing Republican party who recently approved regulations on children’s access to puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones.
The leaked proposal sparked howls of protest from the French Left, which warned the Barnier government was “veering to the far-Right”.
Mr Barnier, 73, a Right-winger and the EU’s former chief Brexit negotiator, has been scrambling to form a new government after Mr Macron appointed him prime minister two weeks ago following weeks of political deadlock in the wake of snap elections in July that ended in a hung parliament.
The first batch of names were leaked on Thursday evening, with the full 16-minister Cabinet due to be officially announced by Sunday at the latest.
Mr Barnier proposed handing Bruno Retailleau,a Right-wing traditionalist senator, the powerful post of interior minister while Macron loyalists were offered seven other ministerial posts.
On Friday, it emerged that he had proposed Ms Garnier – seen as close to Mr Retailleau – as families minister to succeed Sarah El Haïry, a centrist who was the first female minister to make public her homosexuality and her pregnancy resulting from medically assisted procreation.
According to an aide, Mr Macron “alerted” the prime minister to Ms Garnier’s “delicate profile”, saying he was opposed to it.
“The president does not want the new team to unravel his reforms. Garnier’s positions are the antithesis of what has been defended by previous [government] teams,” one unnamed ex-minister told BFMTV.
Another aide close to the negotiations said: “In the final analysis, Michel Barnier is the arbiter: it’s his government. Constitutionally, it is not the president who directly rejects this or that case. He does not block. But he can sound the alarm.”
Reports of her potential appointment caused consternation on the Left.
“I’m speechless. I’m just mad as hell,” said Manon Aubry, a Leftist MEP from Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s France Unbowed party, LFI. MP Sarah Legrain, also from LFI, called her potential nomination a “huge provocation”.
“We have a government that looks set to bring back all the losers of the elections,” said MP Mathilde Panot, also from LFI. “The names cited so far indicate an extreme Right-wing tendency on the part of Macron. There is no respect for universal suffrage,” she said.
Some Macron supporters were also dismayed.
Guillaume Gouffier Valente, an MP from the Left wing of Mr Macron’s Renaissance party, said: “Certain rumours about her appointment to the government are particularly worrying when it comes to defending the rights of women and LGBTQ+ people.
“These battles will never be negotiable’, he wrote on X, calling for “an extremely clear position” from Mr Barnier during his general policy statement on Oct 1.
‘Rather than change, we have a restoration’
Socialist former French president François Hollande, now an MP in the Left-wing alliance, said Mr Macron and Mr Barnier seemed to have forgotten that many centrist and Right-wing MPs owed their election in July to a “Republican front” that saw Left-wingers pull out of the second round to prevent the National Rally from winning.
“Why was there a dissolution if it was only to get more or less the same people, even further to the Right?” he asked. “Rather than change, we have a restoration.”
Ms Garnier won plaudits for steering the review of a Macron Bill to introduce quotas for women in senior positions in large companies.
But in 2013 she opposed same-sex marriage and supported the Manif pour tous (anti-gay marriage) movement against François Hollande’s legalisation, which was passed that year.
In 2021, she also opposed the creation of an offence punishing conversion therapies, practices designed to impose heterosexuality on LGBT people.
And in February 2024, she voted against enshrining the guaranteed freedom to have an abortion in the Constitution: “Our fellow citizens expect the government to focus on putting our country back on its feet, rather than on problems that don’t exist,” she argued.
A few weeks later, she approved a controversial senate bill aimed at regulating gender transitions among minors, notably by banning the prescription of cross-sex hormones and imposing strict conditions on the administration of “puberty blockers” to these young people.
France’s snap legislative elections in July left the National Assembly split into three blocs around a Left-wing alliance, the Macron-compatible centre and Marine Le Pen’s populist and Eurosceptic National Rally.
The Left-wing New Popular Front has the largest number of MPs but Mr Macron rejected its proposed prime minister, saying she would be instantly deposed in a motion of no confidence. Privately telling aides he was convinced France was essentially a “Right-wing country”, he picked Mr Barnier after receiving assurances from the Le Pen camp it would not automatically vote against him.
France is in urgent need of passing a budget to deal with a burgeoning public deficit due to hit 5.6 per cent of GDP this year. Pierre Moscovici, the state auditor president, warned on Friday that the budget risked being “the hardest to put together in the history of the Fifth Republic”.
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