Brexit dealmaker Michel Barnier mooted as candidate for French PM

Gaullist has ‘solid experience of government, parliament and compromise’, says former Macron minister

Brexit dealmaker Michel Barnier has been mooted as a potential “compromise” candidate for French prime minister in a bid to break the deadlock after last month’s snap elections ended in a hung parliament.
The surprise legislative ballot resulted in Emmanuel Macron’s centrist alliance losing key ground, Marine Le Pen’s party making historic gains, and a Left-Green alliance of parties come top. Still, none of these three groups command anything like enough MPs to forge an absolute majority.
After two months of political tension, Mr Macron called an “Olympic truce” over who should get the top government job but is now under pressure to appoint a government chief within the next two weeks.
He is seeking to come up with a solution as he shuttles between the Olympics and his presidential summer retreat at the Fort de Brégancon on the French Riviera.
Aurore Bergé, an influential former Macron minister and leader of his party’s parliamentary group, said any prime minister would need to be able to “build compromises” with the Right, centre and social democrats prepared to break away from the wide Left-wing alliance, which includes MPs from Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s Leftist France Unbowed party, or LFI.
She suggested that Mr Barnier, 73, who comes from the Gaullist Right-wing Republicans party, could fit the bill, along with Xavier Bertrand, the head of the northern Hauts-de-France region, and Gérard Larcher, conservative French senatorial leader.
All three “have solid experience of government, parliament and compromise”, Ms Bergé, who harks from the Right, told Le Figaro on Sunday.
“We don’t need a technical government, but a political government, with experienced people who know how to build compromises, while being respected by MPs and the French people”, she said.
The government would have to be able to “go beyond the Right, right up to the social democrats”, provided that these “leave their unholy alliance with LFI”.
The Left’s New Popular Front alliance have fielded their preferred candidate, Lucie Castets, an unknown civil servant who wants to repeal Mr Macron’s pension reform, but the French present appeared to dismiss her candidacy.
Ms Bergé also ruled out Ms Castets because she has made it plain she intends to implement the Left’s radical programme to the letter. Ms Castets has also come in for criticism for running the finances of Paris’s cash-strapped Socialist-run town hall, which is steeped in almost €10 billion (£8.5 million) in debt.
Mr Barnier was recently critical of Mr Macron telling The Telegraph in June that he had driven France to the brink of a “Frexit” moment.
“It is my conviction that we have to pay huge attention and great respect to what people on the ground think in some very poor regions. That was the case in the UK explaining a large part of the Brexit vote, and I think it could be the same in France.”
But in another op-ed piece in Le Figaro, he said the solutions of “populist” extremists on the Left and Right were far worse.
“In the same way that the Brexiters betrayed the British people and their country’s national interest, our French populists on the far Left and far Right are ready for any kind of lie,” he wrote.
“The answer to the decline and impoverishment of the French people in so many rural areas cannot be found in the unrealistic and dangerous election promises of the two extremes.”