Gabriel Attal, 34, is a new type of French prime minister, more inclined to Diet Coke than good Burgundy, at home with social media and revelations about his personal life, a natural communicator who gets off the press “France rhymes with power” to assert his “authority,” a favorite word.
Since taking office in early January, the boyish Mr. Attal has taken to the countryside, far from his familiar haunts in Paris’ posh districts, muddied his shoes, rested his notes on a choreographed hay bale and calmed down protests farmers through skilful negotiations leavened by multiple concessions.
He told rail workers threatening to strike that “work is a duty,” not an everyday French exhortation. He showed off his new dog on Instagram and explained that he named the high-energy Chow Chow ‘Volta’ after the inventor of the electric battery. He told the National Assembly that he is living proof of a changing France as “a prime minister who owns up to his homosexuality”.
France is backing down, but whether it is ready for the control-narrative politics of emotion and distraction that Mr. Attal embodies is an open question. Time is short. The prime minister’s mission, as coined by a beleaguered President Emmanuel Macron, is clear: reverse the rise of Marine Le Pen’s far-right ahead of European Parliament elections in June and French presidential elections just over three years from now.
Mr. Macron is term-limited and must leave office in 2027. The specter that haunts him is Ms. Le Pen as his successor. To Mr. Atal, he hopes to cultivate one of his own.
“Macron is surprised by Attal, as he is surprised by someone as transgressive as himself, who at the same time is absolutely loyal,” Marisol Turenne, Mr. Attal’s former health and social affairs minister. political guru, he said in an interview. “President believes in Atal’s political sixth sense”.
The “transgression” of both men was that of restless youth against the old order. Neither Mr. Macron nor Mr. Attal ever saw a taboo he didn’t want to break. Mr Macron was a one-man revolution when he came to power in 2017 aged 39, proclaiming the politics of the decaying left and right and offering a malleable post-ideological thing called “Macronism”.
Now, nearly seven years later, Mr Macron is looking to his protégé, or some say clone, to reignite the political excitement. Pragmatism, not conviction, has defined Mr. Attal. Now, he has to perform in a pinched France, without an absolute majority in Parliament and knowing that, as Clément Bon, the former transport minister, put it, “Being prime minister here is very difficult because the president is the one who decides.”
“The question is how far Macron will let Atal go without getting jealous,” said Philippe Labro, a writer and political commentator. Sharing the limelight does not come easily to Mr Macron, as was evident when a former prime minister, Edouard Philippe, became popular and relaxed.
A recent poll for Paris Match magazine showed that Mr Attal has an approval rating of 47%, which is high by French standards. Mr Macron sank to 32%, with Ms Le Pen at 43%.
Mr Atal’s challenge will be to use the hand Mr Macron has dealt him but not appear to bite it as he steps out of the president’s shadow. Already the two men have separated their company for Mrs. Le Pen’s national rally.
This month Mr Macron said he considered the party “outside the arc of democracy”, meaning broadly undemocratic, even as Mr Attal said “the arc of democracy is the semicircle” of the National Assembly and that it will work with all parties there, including the far-right party, which holds 89 seats.
“Attal wants to be president and he will do anything to get it,” said Ms. Touraine, whose daughter was a friend of Mr. Attal’s at school. “Is he ambitious? Yes, in an extreme way. But he doesn’t have a complex. He assumes who he is and I find that positive.”
Mr. Attal, who did not respond to requests for an interview, has been on a whirlwind political journey in the prime minister’s office, known as Matignon. Born in 1989 into a wealthy Parisian family, Jewish on his father’s side and Orthodox Christian on his mother’s side, he studied at an elite private school and at the prestigious Sciences Po university in Paris before drifting into politics, essentially the only job that he ever had. .
“École Alsacienne, Sciences Po, National Assembly, Ministry of Education, Matignon, Gabriel Attal’s career spans 6 kilometers” he was mocked François Ruffin, left-wing MP on X, ex-Twitter, adding: “Disruption and audacity, but not too far from class.”
However, Mr. Attal’s youth was not without challenges. As a teenager he was bullied at school for being gay. “It was a torrent of insults and abuse, and it went on for many months with extreme violence,” he told TF1 television last year. “I suffered.”
The suffering was doubled because he didn’t want to tell his family, fearing “they’d ask him why it’s called that,” when he wasn’t ready to talk about being gay. Finally, a decade later, Mr. Attal, in his account, approached his father on his deathbed in 2015 and said: “Dad, I’ve fallen in love with a man.” His father responded positively, he was willing to meet the man, but he died the next day.
France, where the secrecy of love and sex was almost sacred, is not used to such dramatic confessions, but Mr. Attal is a troublemaker, even though he exercises extreme discipline. A “control freak,” in Ms. Turenne’s words, she has understood that in an age of short attention spans, the way to dictate the agenda is through relentless, varied communication.
He has also understood that this is an era where nationalist politics thrives on fears of immigration. During his brief tenure as education minister, he banned the abaya, or loose full-length robe, worn by some Muslim female students. Leaders of France’s large Muslim community and the left were outraged. they are not fans of Mr. Atal. In cabinet meetings, Mr Attal was known for insisting that the government take up the need to get immigration right.
Mr Attal’s hard-hitting inaugural address to Parliament last month was a hymn to “a nation without equal”. He would refuse, he said, “to have our identity diluted or dissolved.”
“You don’t negotiate with the Republic,” he hammered. “You accept and respect it, in its entirety, without exception!”
As an appeal to Ms Le Pen’s voters, it was hardly subtle.
The journey to the right was long. Mr. Attal’s roots, like Mr. Macron’s, were as a socialist. Starting in the party’s moderate social democratic wing, Mr Attal did two internships with Ms Touraine, then the Socialists’ spokeswoman, before joining her team at the health and social affairs ministry in 2012.
He was 23. Few people guessed what determination lay behind his even manner.
“You don’t feel his ambition at first,” said Luc Broussy, who, as an aging expert, often worked with Mr. Attal. “I never saw him angry. He never betrayed his beliefs because I never saw him affirm anything.”
As Mr Macron’s band picked up its pace in 2016, Mr Attal wavered. He had temporarily accepted a job arranged by Ms. Touraine at the French diplomatic mission to the United Nations in New York.
At the same time, however, she had fallen in love and made a couple with Stéphane Séjourné, now foreign minister, who was and remains close to Mr. Macron. and in early 2017, a Macron victory in the presidential election suddenly seemed almost inevitable.
“He joined Macron at the last minute and this incredible adventure began,” Mr Brusi said. Ms. Turenne recalled telling Mr. Atal in March 2017, “It’s now or never.”
Mr. Atal jumped. Three months later he was a representative in the National Assembly as Mr Macron’s centrist La République en Marche (now Renaissance) party swept June’s parliamentary elections.
“If Séjourné was absent, I’m not sure Attal would have become a Macronist MP in 2017,” Ms Touraine said. (He and Mr. Séjourné have since divorced.)
The files soon began to fall as Mr Macron adopted Mr Attal as a favourite. At the age of 29, in 2018, he became the youngest government minister of the French Fifth Republic as Minister of Education. then the youngest Minister of Education in 2023 and the youngest Prime Minister in 2024.
The task before him now is daunting. He wants to “unlock” the economy — “A receding bureaucracy is an advancing freedom!” — in a country tightly clinging to its social safety net.
He wants to promote green energy against a wave of protests about its high cost. He is representative of the very elite class that people in remote areas see as disconnected from the hardships of real life — a theme Ms Le Pen likes to hammer home.
At the very least, Mr. Attal must nurture his own fierce presidential ambitions while showing loyalty to Mr. Macron, even though the race to succeed the president has already begun.
Before he died in 2015, Mr Attal’s father, a Jew of Tunisian origin, told him: “You are not Jewish, but everyone will think you are. So it’s like you were.”
Mr Attal, who was raised in the Orthodox Church but is not religious, spoke about that scene, as well as the homophobic and anti-Semitic slurs he has sometimes faced on social media. These attacks, if anything, seem to have hardened him.
“One thing I know for sure about him is that if there’s one thing that haunts him and torments him, and I think it torments him, it’s the ambition that allows him to overcome all of this,” Ms Turenne said.
