As the farmers’ protests rumble on, with a blockade of the main motorways leading to Paris, the new prime minister, Gabriel Attal, appeared before the National Assembly for his first general policy speech. This was an opportunity for him to try to convince people of his ability to manage a situation of high tension—given his young age and relative inexperience. The various opposition forces did not rule out a motion of censure against him.
Attal, who was appointed head of government on January 9th, was due to take the floor to present the broad lines of his government’s action on Tuesday, January 30th. But the course of his action had already been set by President Emmanuel Macron at his press conference on January 16th.
The new prime minister announced that he did not wish to submit to a vote of confidence from the deputies at the end of his speech. The constitution does not oblige him to do so, but opposition MPs would have appreciated it at a time when the executive is suffering from a glaring lack of legitimacy. Gabriel Attal, knowing that he does not have an absolute majority in the Assembly, does not want to run the risk of seeing his new government fall.
In the absence of a scheduled vote of confidence, the opposition groups have announced their intention to propose a motion of censure. The left-wing parties were the first to do so, while Les Républicains are holding back for the time being but are threatening to propose one in the coming weeks. Marine Le Pen’s Rassemblement National has also raised the possibility of presenting a motion, or of voting for a motion put forward by the Left. For Mathilde Panot, leader of the left-wing France Insoumise MPs, the motion “will make it possible, since we don’t have a vote of confidence, to have a vote of no confidence. This will clarify who is in opposition and who is in the majority and who supports this government.”
Gabriel Attal defended a stark vision of the nation from the very first words of his speech. Using terms polemical in the eyes of the Left, he explained that he refused to see “French identity diluted or dissolved,” telling MPs:
We are not just any country. France will not be, is not, has never been a nation that endures things. France is a landmark, an ideal, a moral heritage, a protective social model envied the world over.
Faced with accusations of panic or a lack of political clarity levelled at the government, the prime minister chose to display his voluntarism: “To those who want to see a loss of compass, I see determination.”
Attal then sent a strong message to farmers: “Our agriculture is a source of pride, one of the foundations of our identity, with fundamental values: the value of work, effort and entrepreneurial freedom.” “There is and there must be a French agricultural exception,” he asserted, while saying he was very aware of the danger of the “piling up of standards” from which French farmers claim to suffer.
Attal placed his speech under the banner of “sovereignty” and “independence,” echoing the statements made by Emmanuel Macron on a trip to Sweden, where he said he was against the free trade agreement with the South American trade bloc, Mercosur, currently being negotiated in Brussels, because of “rules that are not the same as ours.” The Rassemblement National condemns this tactical U-turn as a sign of possible further betrayal—given that Macron has been in favour of the treaty from the outset. The party also points out the fact that Macron’s pro-European policy is in complete contradiction with the declarations of sovereignty of his prime minister.
The new prime minister continued with a string of measures designed to build on Macron’s press conference on January 16th: making payment of the social income conditional on 15 hours’ work per week; ending specific benefits for the unemployed at the end of their entitlement; simplifying standards for small companies, and inaugurating grade-level classes in schools even before the start of the 2024 academic year. He also announced a reform of State Medical Aid, already wanted by his predecessor Élisabeth Borne—but without indicating which direction this reform would take.
La France Insoumise leader Jean-Luc Mélenchon did not wait until the end of the speech to vigorously denounce Attal’s communication, and in particular the economic measures. According to him, Attal was guilty of the “most reactionary speech in a century.” For their part, the Les Républicains MPs criticised “a catalogue of small measures” disconnected from the country’s real needs.
Given the double burden of the Constitutional Council’s unravelling of the immigration law and the farmers’ crisis, Attal’s government may find it hard to convince people of the relevance of its actions for many weeks to come.
